Meet the organisers
Henning Grønbæk
Henning Grønbæk (MD, PhD) is the Clinical Chair Professor at the Department of Hepatology and Gastroenterology, Aarhus University Hospital, Aarhus, Denmark, and consultant in Internal Medicine.
From 2022-2025 he served as a member of the EASL Educational Committee focused on training of future clinical and academic hepatologists.
In research he has a key interest in clinical and experimental chronic inflammatory liver diseases. The primary focus has been pathogenesis and interventions focused on macrophages and macrophage activation markers. He is involved in several international collaborations including the EF-CLIF on acute-on-chronic liver failure. A special clinical and research interest has been non-alcoholic fatty liver disease with experimental and clinical studies on pathogenesis, biomarker discovery and new treatments.
Furthermore, Henning Gronbaek has supervised more than 40 PhD and research year students.
Konstantin Kazankov
Konstantin Kazankov is a consultant Hepatologist at the Department of Hepatology and Gastroenterology, Aarhus University Hospital and Clinical Associate Professor at Aarhus University.
He has earned his PhD degree investigating the role and biomarkers of macrophage activation in metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD). Furthermore, he has performed clinical research in complications of cirrhosis, in particular cardiac abnormalities, portal hypertension and cirrhosis decompensation, including a groundbreaking study of remote home management in patients with cirrhosis during his stay as a Senior Clinical Research Fellow at University College London and The Sheila Sherlock Liver Centre, Royal Free Hospital, London, UK.
His current research is focused on cardiac risk factors and outcomes in MASLD patients, as well as decompensated cirrhosis.
Karen Louise Thomsen
Karen Louise Thomsen (MD, PhD) has a strong basic research background in experimental and translational hepatology, as well as being a fully trained consultant Hepatologist and Clinical Professor in the Department of Hepatology and Gastroenterology, Aarhus University Hospital.
Her principal early research contributions were within the area of metabolic liver function in inflammatory states. She pursued studies at the bench and in animal disease models, and translated her findings to clinical studies in the setting of metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD).
Her experimental research skills were honed by a significant time spent in the lab of Professor Jacob George in Sydney, Australia. She further enriched her clinical translational skills with a year in London at The Royal Free Liver Transplant Unit as a Senior Research Fellow, allied to the UCL Institute for Liver and Digestive Health. This rounded her research and clinical specialist training, and generated interests in the study of cirrhosis decompensation.
Her ongoing clinical studies investigate metabolic liver and brain dysfunction in MASLD patients through in vivo functional tests as well as MRI and PET imaging. Also, she is the PI of a large, multicentre, randomised, placebo-controlled study investigating the effect of faecal microbiota transplantation for prevention of complications, progression and mortality in patients with decompensated liver cirrhosis.
Karen Louise Thomsen has supervised numerous PhD students, as well as overseeing pre-graduate scholar students.