2025 MIMS Clinical Research Fellowship awarded

Alicia Lind at University Hospital of Umeå and Umeå University is the winner of the national Clinical Research Fellowship (CRF) program for 2025.

ImageMattias Pettersson

An international panel of clinical and basic researchers has awarded the fellowship to Alicia Lind at Norrland University Hospital, Umeå to conduct research on improving diagnostics and outcomes of post-covid condition.

Alicia is a specialist physician in anesthesiology and intensive care at Norrland University Hospital, and a researcher at the Department of Diagnostics and Intervention at Umeå University. Her research focuses on the interaction between metabolism and the immune system in severe infections such as sepsis and COVID-19. She holds a medical degree and a PhD in clinical microbiology from Umeå University. She has been actively working in the field of precision diagnostics at Umeå University.

In her MIMS CRF project, she aims to investigate the nature, dynamics, and mechanisms of long-term health effects following COVID-19. More specifically, she wants to identify sub-phenotypes of post-COVID condition (PCC) to guide personalized rehabilitation and treatment and develop predictive algorithms using high-resolution immunometabolic profiling to enhance diagnostics, pathophysiological understanding, and prognostication of PCC.

Alicia says, "Why some individuals develop long-term complications after COVID-19, while others recover quickly, remains a pressing question. So far, the lack of high-quality clinical cohorts and biobanks has hampered progress in this critical area of research. Our clinical cohort study, CoVUm, may change that. With its large size, wide spectrum of disease severity, and exceptionally low drop-out rate, it is one of the few studies worldwide capable of providing long-term insights into post-COVID1 of 4condition (PCC). This creates a rare opportunity for us to connect metabolic and immunological changes with long-term clinical outcomes. Through broad, interdisciplinary collaborations, we are conducting in-depth studies of immunometabolic signatures alongside conventional biomarkers of immune response and organ dysfunction. Our group includes expertise in clinical medicine, analytical chemistry, and data-driven science – with the potential to develop new methods and knowledge relevant not only to COVID-19 but also to other post-infectious conditions. I chose Prof Martin Rosvall as a collaborator, since he and his group specialize in multivariate data analysis with machine learning methods in biological systems, expertise that is required in this project with complex and large datasets on multiple levels."

In her MIMS CRF project, Alicia is collaborating with Martin Rosvall, a professor at Icelab in the Department of Physics at Umeå University, where she will have access to machine learning methods designed to identify patterns in complex biological data.

Martin says "Alicia's work on post-COVID condition tackles a challenge that illustrates why interdisciplinary collaboration matters. The CoVUm cohort generates massive, multilayered datasets that no single approach can fully illuminate. My group brings machine learning methods designed to find patterns in complex biological data, but these methods only reveal meaningful insights when guided by deep clinical and biochemical understanding. The MIMS Clinical Research Fellowship provides exactly the protected research time and resources Alicia needs to develop the project. With these resources, we can move beyond simply describing post-COVID symptoms to identifying the immunometabolic signatures that distinguish different patient subgroups—signatures that could reveal why some people develop long-term complications while others recover completely."

MIMS Clinical Research Fellowships provide guaranteed research time and fund the fellow’s research up to a total value of 3.2 mio SEK.

Oliver Billker, Director of MIMS, says: "We are delighted to welcome Alicia to the MIMS community. Her project is a great example of the type of interdisciplinary and collaborative work we want to foster. It provides an opportunity for international collaboration in molecular medicine, which is at the core of our partnership with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and its Nordic Partnership."

MIMS receives funding from the Swedish Research Council, the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the Kempe Foundations and Umeå University to foster the next generation of outstanding researchers in infection medicine. It is the Swedish node in the EMBL network, to which it is connected through the Nordic EMBL Partnership for Molecular Medicine.