Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede was born in 1968 in the Swedish town of Umeå. Her father was a PhD student at the newly established university and her mother worked for the postal service. After her father concluded his thesis work for a PhD in inorganic chemistry, he accepted a position at a welding company and moved the family to Gothenburg. During her early school years, Wittung-Stafshede was a shy child with a talent for math. In high school, her math and physics teacher challenged the class with university level problems. Most students were upset, but this sparked an interest for her in pursuing the subjects in higher education.

Before entering university, she spent a year in California working as an au pair. During this period, she gained new skills and insight: she learned English and realized that changing diapers was only fun for a brief period of time. Back in Sweden, she began her undergraduate studies in chemical engineering at Chalmers University of Technology. This was the only program with female students but, she says, she enrolled because she did not have good enough grades to get into the physics program. Early on, she realized that she did not want to become a chemical engineer; she was more inclined toward basic science. In her last year, she was an ex­change student at Imperial College in London, where she truly learned what it was like to do research — and she loved it.

She returned to Sweden with her combined bachelors and masters degree and started her PhD studies in physical chemistry at Chalmers with Bengt Norden working on DNA analogs and recombination. Norden believed in giving his trainees autonomy, which was good for Wittung-Stafshede, as it allowed her to pursue her ideas and ambitions. She re­members her PhD years as a wonderful time when she came in to the lab every day and focused solely on experiments — her mom worried that she never did anything else. After four years, in December 1996, she finished her PhD degree.

In January 1997, she married Patric, who was her classmate in the undergraduate program, and in February of that year she moved to California for her postdoc at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the lab of Harry Gray. At that time, it was a quest to find out how fast proteins could fold and she used laser-triggering methods to find a small protein that folded in only a few microseconds.

During her postdoc, she lightheartedly applied for faculty po­sitions in the United States, not really expecting to make the move. When she received calls for interviews, however, she took the idea seriously and accepted a faculty position in the Chemistry Department at Tulane University in New Orleans in 1999. She was the first female faculty member in the de­partment. In less than three years, at the same time her first daughter was born, she sent in her tenure package.

 

In 2004, Wittung-Stafshede was recruited to Rice University in Houston. After five years there, and having had another daughter, the family decided to move back to Sweden. The couple wanted to raise their children in Sweden, where all of their relatives were located. She got a professorship in the Chemistry Department at Umeå University and she spent seven years there until Chalmers University recruited her to serve as division head in a newly formed department in 2015.

She started her independent career working on protein folding, with emphasis on the role of metals in the folding of metalloproteins as she had found that metal cofactors could interact with unfolded polypeptides. Over the years her research has developed in various directions. For example, she was one of the pioneers addressing how the jammed cell environment (macromolecular crowding) affects protein biophysics. Also, partly because of feedback from the National Institutes of Health, she began to study biophysics of human copper transport proteins to figure out how the metal ions reach target proteins in cells. Back in Sweden, she brought her own unique approach to studies of misfolding and amyloid formation. Today, her research concerns biophysical aspects of both amyloid reactions and copper transport, and for the latter, its link to cancer. She says that the biological relevance of her research becomes more important the older she gets.

Wittung-Stafshede has always been involved in many things apart from her own research. Due to her experience with American culture, she is more outspoken than most Swedish faculty. She enjoys writing papers and she has a long publica­tion list. She also enjoys speaking to the public and acting as a mentor for younger colleagues and students. She notes that graduating PhD students may be the most rewarding task; “this way we make new scientists that in turn can do more research,” she says. Pernilla was selected as a prestigious Wallenberg Scholar in 2010 and in 2016, she was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of the Sciences. Through the years, she realized how much gender inequality exists in academia in Sweden. She felt a responsibility to speak up to help improve the opportunities for future generations of females. She recently wrote a proposal for a large initiative on gender equality, Gender Initiative for Excellence (Genie), that her university funded. It is the world’s largest academic initiative on gender equality in terms of funding and started in 2019. Pernilla will be leading this initiative for the first few years of the 10-year program.

Wittung-Stafshede’s career may look straightforward but she has managed health and personal challenges along the way. Although she hides it well, she still feels insecure about her own abilities. “Academia is a continuous fight to prove yourself,” she says. Even so, she would not want to change anything about her career. She enjoys every day. Her advice to young women is to “do what you love, then you will work hard because it is fun. Academia needs more women and women’s perspectives and there are so many scientific challenges that must be solved in new and creative ways.”