In December 2013 I qualified as Associate Professor in Epidemiology at Uppsala University, Sweden and started my own research group. The focus of my research is to identify risk factors and causes for diabetes and cardiovascular disease onset and progression. In the past three years, I have recruited four PhD students and two post-doctoral fellows. So far, my group has taken part in the development and application of bioinformatics analysis pipelines for metabolomics and proteomics data in large population-based studies, which I anticipate will have large impacts on the field of epidemiology. I have also led work on the use of Mendelian Randomization methods in the context of circulating lipids, an article which was accompanied by an Editorial in the journal Diabetes. I have organized the linkage of several large national registers and have now access to two databases, one on 4.5 million adults, and the other one comprising one million children, with detailed information on health and exposure to animals. The latter has been used for assessing the long-standing question regarding an association of early exposure to animals and childhood asthma, a study which not only gained huge media interest including interviews for BBC World and title story in The Times in 2015, but is also used as part of the scientific basis for new policies on pediatrician advice to parents about pet ownership in Sweden.