Draft:Kjetill Sigurd Jakobsen

Kjetill Sigurd Jakobsen (born 12 April 1958. ) is a Norwegian biologist with a focus on evolutionary genetics and genomics. He was appointed a Professor at the University of Oslo, Norway, in 1994, and in 2012 he became a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

Jakobsen's leadership roles in industrial innovation include being the founder of the biotech company Genpoint AS in 1998.

Jakobsen was in 2016 the leader of Inreach and Outreach at the establishment of Digital Life Norway, a large-scale initiative to boost transdisciplinary biotechnology research and innovation. He is now a project leader & Expert Task Force member of Digital Life Norway 2.0.

Jakobsen is the Chair of Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES) at the Department of Biosciences (IBV) at the University of Oslo (UiO), and a Director at the national technology core facility The Norwegian Sequencing Centre (NSC)

Jakobsen led the genome sequencing of Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua), thereby adding it to the List of sequenced animal genomes and showing that this species as well as the other codfishes (Gadiformes) lack the central immune component major histocompatibility complex class II (MHC II). He was also the first to demonstrate tertiary endosymbiosis of plastids using genetic information and the genetic structure and horizontal gene transfer of the saxitoxin genes in dinoflagellates.

Since 2019 Jakobsen has been the leader. of EBP-Nor : The Norwegian Network for the Earth BioGenome Project, a partnership among the major universities and other academic and non-academic institutions in Norway. The EBP-Nor initiative aims to sequence and catalogue all eukaryotic species occurring in Norway, an estimated 45,000 species