Jurgita Skiecevičienė

Prof. Jurgita Skieceviciene, PhD, is a biomedical scientist and professor at the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences (LSMU), where she leads the Laboratory of Clinical and Molecular Gastroenterology at the Institute for Digestive Research. She holds a PhD in Biology with a specialization in molecular biology, earned for her work on the genetic characteristics of patients with inflammatory bowel disease in Baltic countries. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Clinical Molecular Biology at Christian-Albrecht University in Kiel, Germany, where she investigated the genetic basis of microbiome heritability.

Prof. Skieceviciene’s research lies at the interface of human genetics, microbiome science, molecular gastroenterology, and systems biology. Her main scientific interests include the role of host genetic factors and microbiota-derived metabolites in the pathogenesis of gastrointestinal diseases, particularly inflammatory bowel disease and gastrointestinal cancers. She is actively involved in the development and application of intestinal organoid models for disease modeling and drug testing, as well as in biomarker discovery through multi-omics approaches.

She has served as principal investigator or senior scientist in more than 20 national and international research projects, including several funded under the EU’s Horizon Europe and EU4Health frameworks (e.g., miGut-Health, PerPrevCID, ONCOSCREEN, TOGAS). Prof. Skieceviciene is a member of several prominent scientific networks, including the International IBD Genetics Consortium and the European “1 Million Genomes” initiative. Nationally, she contributes to expert committees of the Lithuanian Research Council and the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences.

Her scientific work has been recognized with multiple awards, including the Lithuanian Science Prize in Biomedicine (2021) and the L’Oréal-UNESCO “For Women in Science” Award (2019). She has authored or co-authored over 60 peer-reviewed publications in international journals and currently has an h-index of 24 and more than 9,800 citations (Clarivate Analytics).

Prof. Skieceviciene’s research continues to advance understanding of host-microbiome interactions in digestive health and disease and contributes to the development of personalized prevention and treatment strategies.