Anders Sejr Hansen, PhD

Anders obtained his undergraduate and Master’s degree in Chemistry at Oxford University in 2010. He received his PhD in Chemistry and Chemical Biology from Harvard University in 2015, where he worked with Erin O’Shea and applied systems biology approaches to understand how cells can encode and transmit information in the dynamics of transcription factor activation. For his post-doc at UC Berkeley with Robert Tjian and Xavier Darzacq, Anders developed new imaging approaches to track single proteins in living cells and applied these to understand the mechanisms of key architectural proteins involved in 3D genome organization.

Anders began his independent lab at MIT in 2020 where he is currently an Associate Professor of Biological Engineering. The Hansen lab is broadly interested in 3D genome structure and function, and develops new super-resolution and single-molecule imaging methods to track chromatin looping, transcription, and protein dynamics in living cells, new high-resolution 3D genomics methods to capture looping interactions as well as new computational approaches. Current application areas of interest include the dynamics of chromatin looping and transcription, how misfolding of the genome causes disease, connecting disease-associated variants to target genes, the basic mechanisms of 3D genome folding, the selectivity rules between enhancers and promoters, machine learning, and synthetic 3D genome biology.

Anders has won several awards including an NIH K99 Pathway to Independence award (2019), NIH Director’s New Innovator award (2020), a Pew-Stewart Scholar for Cancer Research award (2021), an NSF CAREER award (2024), an NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award (2024), and an MIT Edgerton Award (2025), the highest award at MIT for junior faculty.