Jesper Tegnér is Professor and Associate Dean in the Biomedical Sciences Division at KAUST. He is the founder of two biotechnology startups, and his research spans artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, and translational medicine.
He holds an MD (Doctor of Medicine) and a Ph.D. in Experimental and Computational Neuroscience from Karolinska Institutet, along with two additional degrees, one with a major in Pure and Applied Mathematics (minor in theoretical physics) and another with a major in Philosophy (minor in psychology). Previously, he held a chaired strategic professorship at Karolinska Institutet, served as Director of Computational Medicine, and was Head of the Division of Computational Biology (Dept. of Physics).
His distinctions include being an ERC co-investigator, a finalist for the Göran Gustafsson Prize in Mathematics, recognition as outstanding faculty at Karolinska Institutet, multiple international competition awards, and approximately 400 publications.
Selected recent publications (2025/26)
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- Reem Alsulami, Robert Lehmann, Sumeer A Khan, Vincenzo Lagani, David Gómez-Cabrero, Narsis A Kiani, Jesper Tegner. Predicting and interpreting cell-type specific drug responses in the low data regime using inductive priors. Nature Machine Intelligence. 2026
- Haoling Zhang, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Hector Zenil, Pin-Yu Chen, Yue Shen, Narsis A Kiani, Jesper N Tegnér Leveraging network motifs to improve artificial neural networks. Nature Communication. 2025,
- Núria Planell, Xabier Martínez-de-Morentin, Daniel Mouzo, David Lara-Astiaso, Amaia Vilas-Zornoza, Patxi San Martín-Uriz, Diego Alignani, Bruno Paiva, Alberto Maillo, Aleksandra Kurowska, Nerea Berastegui, Paula Garcia-Olloqui, Arantxa Urdangarin, Peri Noori, Asier Ortega-Legarreta, Mikel Hernaez, Vincenzo Lagani, Narsis Kiani, Matthias Merkenschlager, Teresa Ezponda, José I Martín-Subero, Ricardo N Ramírez*, Jesper Tegner*, Felipe Prosper*, David Gomez-Cabrero*. Uncovering the regulatory landscape of early human B-cell lymphopoiesis and its implications in the pathogenesis of B-ALL Science Advance. 2025 [* corresponding authors]
- Gomez-Cabreo & Tegner. Data meets prior knowledge for interpretable mechanistic inference in biology: Recovering biological networks. Nature Machine Intelligence. 7 (7), 987-, 2025
- Sumeer Ahmad Khan, Xabier Martínez-de-Morentin, Abdel Rahman Alsabbagh, Alberto Maillo, Vincenzo Lagani, David Gomez-Cabrero, Robert Lehmann, Jesper Tegner. Multimodal Foundation Transformer Models for Multiscale Genomics. Nature Methods. December 2025
- Róisín M McManus, Max P Komes, Angelika Griep, Francesco Santarelli, Stephanie Schwartz, Juan Ramón Perea, Johannes CM Schlachetzki, David S Bouvier, Michelle-Amirah Khalil, Mario A Lauterbach, Lea Heinemann, Titus Schlüter, Mehran Shaban Pour, Marta Lovotti, Rainer Stahl, Fraser Duthie, Juan F Rodríguez-Alcázar, Susanne V Schmidt, Jasper Spitzer, Peri Noori, Alberto Maillo, Andreas Boettcher, Brian Herron, John McConville, David Gomez-Cabrero, Jesper Tegnér, Christopher K Glass, Karsten Hiller, Eicke Latz, Michael T Heneka NLRP3-mediated glutaminolysis controls microglial phagocytosis to promote Alzheimer’s disease progression. Immunity. 2025 58(2), 326-
- Yanbo Zhang, Sumeer A Khan, Adnan Mahmud, Huck Yang, Alexander Lavin, Michael Levin, Jeremy Frey, Jared Dunnmon, James Evans, Alan Bundy, Saso Dzeroski, Jesper Tegner, Hector Zenil, Exploring the role of large language models in the scientific method: From Hypothesis to Discovery. npj Artificial Intelligence 2025
- Abdel Rahman Alsabbagh, Mahmoud Zahran, Ali Balubaid, Sumeer Ahmad Khan, Robert Lehmann, Xabier Martinez de Morentin, Vincenzo Lagani, Narsis A Kiani, David Gomez-Cabrero, Jesper Tegnér. TACTIC: An explainable multi-agent architecture for classification & interpretable reasoning in spatial transcriptomics International Conference Machine Learning. ICLM 2025
- Sumeer Ahmad Khan, Xabier Martinez de Morentin, Vincenzo Lagani, Robert Lehmann, Abdel Rahman Alsabbagh, Mahmoud Zahran, Narsis A Kiani, David Gomez-Cabrero, Jesper Tegnér. SPELL: Spatial prompting with chain-of-thought for zero-shot learning in spatial transcriptomics. International Conference Learning Representations. ICLR 2025
- Sumeer Ahmad Khan, Xabier Martínez de Morentin, Vincenzo Lagani, Robert Lehmann, Narsis A Kiani, David Gomez-Cabrero, Jesper Tegnér. stDiffusion: A diffusion based model for generative spatial transcriptomics. International Conference Learning Representations. ICLR 2025
