Maria Hansson

I got an MSc degree in Biology from Lund university (1999) and I continued to finish my PhD at the Department of Ecology, division of Animal Ecology in 2004. My thesis investigated how different genotypes contribute to biotransformation capacity in wild populations of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) carrying high loads of PCBs in their tissues.

Between 2004 and 2006 I was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Biology Department, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, MA, USA. There, I visited Dr. Mark Hahn’s lab and performed functional analyses of the Atlantic salmon AHR genes and their expressed proteins in order to find out more about their role in the mediation of toxicity from dioxin exposure. 

Website of the Biology Department at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

I am now employed at the Center for Environmental and Climate Research (CEC) and have my research group at the Department of Biology in the Ecology Building. 

My expertise lies in answering questions about how environmental pollutants interact with organisms on a molecular level. By identifying target genes for where toxic responses originate we can make better predictions about resulting effects both on a short and long term scale.

The main objective of research in my laboratory is to understand how environmental pollutants interfere with and change biological processes in organisms from natural, wild populations. Our lab tries to identify which genes are affected by pollutants and how exposure changes their function. Our research is also focused on genetic biodiversity and if specific allelic variants can be linked to observed responses. Our long-term goal is to make prediction about how organisms will adapt to living in a contaminated future world in both water and land environments.