Kristian Vlahoviček
Group leader and Full Professor of Bioinformatics at Faculty of science, University of Zagreb.
While studying molecular biology at the University of Zagreb he realized that computer technology can provide very strong help in biosciences. For his master thesis he worked on a program for absorption correction CORRECT and its application to hydrochlorothiazide-hexamethylenetetramine adduct. He obtained his PhD in Bioinformatics/Biochemistry, working on a 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.
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. In 2011 he became full professor at Faculty of science at Zagreb University. Since 2009 he is also an adjunct associate professor at the University of Oslo, Norway. From 2008 to 2012 he was head of Division of Biology, Faculty of Science at University of Zagreb
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 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
Selected publications (10)
1. Abe KI, Yamamoto R, Franke V, Cao M, Suzuki Y, Suzuki MG, Vlahoviček K, Svoboda P, Schultz RM, Aoki F The first murine zygotic transcription is promiscuous and uncoupled from splicing and 3′ processing. The EMBO journal 2015, in press.[IF 10.748; Q1]
2. Polak P, Karlić R, Koren A, Thurman R, Sandstrom R, Lawrence MS, Reynolds A, Rynes E, Vlahoviček K, Stamatoyannopoulos JA, Sunyaev SR Cell-of-origin chromatin organization shapes the mutational landscape of cancer. Nature 2015 518: 360-364 [IF 42.351; Q1]
3. Yukawa M, Akiyama T, Franke V, Mise N, Isagawa T, Suzuki Y, Suzuki MG, Vlahoviček K, Abe K, Aburatani H, Aoki F Genome-wide analysis of the chromatin composition of histone H2A and H3 variants in mouse embryonic stem cells. PLoS One, 2014 9: e92689 [IF 3.534; Q1]
4. Falanga A, Stojanovic O, Kiffer-Moreira T, Pinto S, Millan JL, Vlahoviček K, Baralle M Exonic splicing signals impose constraints upon the evolution of enzymatic activity. Nucleic acids research, 2014 42: 5790-5798 [IF 8.808; Q1]
5. Flemr, M., Malik, R., Franke, V., Nejepinska, J., Sedlacek, R., Vlahoviček, K., and Svoboda, P. A retrotransposon-driven Dicer isoform directs endogenous siRNA production in mouse oocytes, Cell 2013. 155(4):807-16. [IF 32.401; Q1]
6. Roller M, Lucić V, Nagy I, Perica T, and Vlahoviček, K. Environmental shaping of codon usage and functional adaptation across microbial communities, Nucleic Acids Res, 2013. 41(19):8842-52. [IF 8.808; Q1]
7. Supek, F., N. Škunca, J. Repar, K. Vlahoviček, and T. Šmuc, Translational selection is ubiquitous in prokaryotes. PLoS Genet, 2010. 6(6): p. e1001004. [IF 9.543; Q1]
8. Karlić, R., H.R. Chung, J. Lasserre, K. Vlahoviček, and M. Vingron, Histone modification levels are predictive for gene expression. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 2010. 107(7): p. 2926-31. [IF 9.771; Q1]
9. Harcet, M., M. Roller, H. Ćetković, D. Perina, M. Wiens, W.E. Muller, and K. Vlahoviček, Demosponge EST sequencing reveals a complex genetic toolkit of the simplest metazoans. Mol Biol Evol, 2010. 27(12): p. 2747-56. [IF 14.308; Q1]
10. Šikić, M., S. Tomić, and K. Vlahoviček, Prediction of protein-protein interaction sites in sequences and 3D structures by random forests. PLoS Comput Biol, 2009. 5(1): p. e1000278. [IF 5.759; Q1]