34th PhD café – Bioinfo

34th PhD café

March 5, 2025

PhD student Doris Repušić presented her research on genetic factors influencing COVID-19 severity at the 34th PhD Café, a public science event promoting young Croatian researchers.

On March 5th, 2025, our PhD student Doris Repušić participated in the 34th PhD Café, an initiative that brings science closer to the public in an informal setting. She presented her doctoral research on Patients’ genetic factors associated with the severity of COVID-19 symptoms in the Croatian population.

PhD Café is part of a broader effort to promote young Croatian scientists, especially those funded under the Croatian Research Council’s “Young Researchers Career Development Project – Training of New PhDs”. Through engaging discussions, it offers doctoral candidates a platform to share their research with a wider audience.

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Kristian Vlahoviček

Group leader and Full Professor of Bioinformatics at the Faculty of Science, University of Zagreb

While studying molecular biology at the University of Zagreb he developed a strong interest in applying computational methods and approaches to biosciences. For his master thesis he worked on a problem in X-ray crystallography and developed a program for absorption correction of scattered X-ray data. He obtained his PhD in Bioinformatics/Biochemistry, still pursuing his structural biology interests, working on a computational prediction of structural and physicochemical properties of DNA. He spent 10 years as a research fellow at the International Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Trieste, Italy, where he also worked on computational prediction and classification of protein domains using machine learning approaches.

In 2002 he established a computational biology group at the Zagreb University, where he moved permanently in 2006 with the EMBO Young Investigators Programme installation grant, and directed the scientific interests towards the newly emerging field of genomics. His bioinformatics group develops computational tools and uses machine learning techniques to tackle open questions in developmental genomics and metagenomics.

In 2011 he became full professor at the Faculty of Science at Zagreb University. He had several international appointments, including a 4-year adjunct professorship at the University of Oslo, Norway and a two-year adjunct professorship at the University of Skövde, Sweden. From 2008 to 2012 he served as the head of the Division of Biology, Faculty of Science at University of Zagreb and was responsible for managing a division of ~150 staff.

He is involved in teaching four graduate-level courses: Bioinformatics, Algorithms and programming, Statistics and machine learning and Computational genomics. During his time as a group leader more than 30 doctoral and master students graduated under his supervision. Some of his graduates continued with PhD and postdoctoral training at prestigious universities around the world, including LMB Cambridge, UK; EMBL, Heidelberg, Germany; RIKEN, Japan and ETH, Zurich, Switzerland.

His scientific track-record includes more than 60 publications in high-level journals and talks in many renowned institutions throughout the world. His research topics are: developmental and differentiation genomics, metagenomics, population genomics and glycomics, origins of multicellularity, epigenomics of cancer, development of computational methods and application of machine learning in genomics and molecular biology.

He is the reviewer in a number of scientific journals, as well as national and international funding bodies and programmes, such as ESF Programme, EC FP7, H2020, and Horizon Europe Programmes, Estonian National Funding Agency, Hungarian National Funding Agency, Flanders Research Foundation, The Netherlands ZonMw Vidi Programme, Croatian National Funding Agencies. He reviewed program applications for Croatian pre-accession and accession structural funds.

Prof. Vlahoviček is a Fellow of the Academia Europaea, and a member of several professional societies, at the national and international level. Professor Vlahoviček is a strong proponent of science reforms in Croatia and evidence-based policy making. He served in the steering committee of Croatia’s highly successful science funding body, the Unity through Knowledge Fund (UKF) and has participated in several strategy-drafting panels at the university and national level. He also served as the Member of the Steering Committee of the Ruđer Bošković Institute, a leading Croatian research entity in natural sciences, with ~900 staff.