2021 NOF Hatton Awards to Navdeep Kaur Brar and Mirjam Majster

2021 NOF Hatton award winners are announced during the opening ceremony of the 2021 CED–IADR/NOF Oral Health Research Congress,which was held in Brussels, Belgium, on September 16-18. Two winners, Mirjam Majster from Karolinska Institute, Sweden and Navdeep Kaur Brar from University of Oslo, Norway will represent NOF in the IADR Hatton award competition, which will be held in conjunction with the 2022 IADR/APR General Session & Exhibition from June 22-25, 2022 in Chengdu, China.

Navdeep Kaur Brar is a doctoral research fellow at the Institute of Oral Biology, at the University of Oslo. Her principal supervisor is Professor Fernanda C. Petersen. Co-supervisors are Dr. Roger Junges, Dr. Sudhanshu Shekar and Professor Anders Håkansson.

Her research project is related to one of the biggest challenges we are facing today, the antimicrobial resistance crisis. The incidence of antimicrobial resistance is increasing both among pathogenic organisms and among bacterial species of the normal flora in the oral cavity. Professor Håkansson’s laboratory at Lund University, Sweden, has discovered a molecule from breastmilk, HAMLET, with direct antibacterial activity against selected pathogens that also serves to reduce antibiotic- resistance development. The research is mainly focused on the impact of antibiotics on the Human Oral Microbiome, and how HAMLET, a human protein-lipid complex may prevent microbiome perturbations led by antibiotics exposure.

Statement from Navdeep: I would like to thank the IADR-NOF for choosing my project for the NOF HATTON award 2021. It is a great honor to receive this award. I feel humbled to get the opportunity to disseminate my research project on a global level and represent NOF at IADR 2022! Many thanks to my supervisors and my entire research group at the institute of Oral Biology, University of Oslo, for always support, motivate and inspire me to evolve as a researcher (Photo:Sjur M.Kleppean OD/UIO)

Mirjam Majster is a dentist and lecturer at the Department of Dental Medicine, Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. She successfully defended her thesis entitled “Gateway to the gut : salivary alterations in inflammatory bowel disease” in June 2021, which bridges gastroenterology, oral medicine, and immunology. Besides her clinical work as a general dentist in Odense, Denmark, she is currently a university lecturer affiliated to research, focusing on mucosal and salivary alterations associated with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

The award winning abstract “Salivary Calprotectin and Neutrophils in Intestinal and Oral Disease” is part of her doctoral thesis which was supervised by Dr. Elisabeth A. Boström (DENTMED, Karolinska Institutet), and co-supervised by Prof. Sven Almer (MedS, Karolinska Institutet), Dr. Ronaldo Lira Jr., and Prof. Annsofi Johannsen (both from DENTMED, Karolinska Institutet). Her research focuses on the expression of inflammatory mediators in the saliva of IBD patients – their potential to reflect intestinal inflammation and IBD treatment response, and their possible link to mechanisms behind the occurrence of oral manifestations of IBD.

Statement from Mirjam: It is a great honor to attain the 2021 NOF Hatton award from the NOF and I am looking forward to representing the division at the international competition. It is truly flattering to have mine and the research group’s work acknowledged in this way. (Photo text: Mirjam Majster (to the left) with her thesis supervisor Elisabeth A. Boström (to the right). Photo: private)

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