Lars Folke Olsen is associate professor emeritus at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Southern Denmark. He obtained his M.Sc from the University of Copenhagen in 1977. He has been a visiting researcher at Imperial College, London, Ruhr University Bochum, University of Arizona, Tucson and University of Heidelberg. His work focuses on developing and applying biophysical and physical chemical methods to measure and understand biological dynamics, i.e. how biological systems (cells and organisms) behave temporally and what impact this has for the organism. In his studies he uses optical nanosensors and fluorescent probes to study how e.g. metabolites in a cell change with time. To do this he has developed optical nanosensors to measure hydrogen peroxide, glucose, ATP and fructose 1,6 bisphosphate and the physical state of intracellular water in real time. The date obtained are analyzed by advanced biostatistical methods, which are subsequently used to formulate realistic and detailed mathematical models of processes in the cell and the organism. This has led to new insight in cell metabolism, e.g. that intracellular water exerts a tight control over metabolism. He has also done pioneering studies in chaos theory and, among other things, published the first experimental study of chaos in a (bio)chemical reaction system.
