Date of Birth: November 8th, 1974
Place of Birth: Zagreb, Croatia
Education:
Harvard University, AB, 1997
Stanford University, PhD, 2004
Contact Address
Bojan Žagrović, PhD
MedILS - Mediterranean Institute For Life Sciences
Meštrovićevo šetalište bb
HR - 21000 Split
HRVATSKA
Phone: +385 21 555 602
E-Mail: zagrovic@medils.hr
Bojan Žagrović has been a group leader of the Computational Biophysics of Macromolecules research group at MedILS since the summer of 2007.
After finishing his studies at MIOC, Zagreb and a two years stay at the La Roche College (Pittsburgh, PA, USA), he received an AB undergraduate degree in Biochemical Sciences magna cum laude from Harvard University (Cambridge, USA) in 1997. His thesis work involved studying the activity of the brain adenylyl cyclase with prof. Eva J. Neer at the Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Žagrović carried out his PhD work at Stanford University (Stanford, USA), first in the group of prof. Richard W. Aldrich working on a crystallographic analysis of the mslo ion channel, followed by the work in computational biophysics of protein folding with prof. Vijay S. Pande. In 2004. he defended his PhD under prof. Pande with a thesis on the applications of worldwide-distributed computing in studying the fundamental biophysics of macromolecules. In the course of his PhD, he helped set up and utilized a supercluster of more than 200,000 volunteer processors (Folding@Home project) to study how proteins move and change shape.
Following his doctoral studies, dr. Žagrović carried out a series of computational and experimental studies (most notably, small angle X-ray scattering) at Stanford and the Advanced Photon Source of the Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne, USA), working with professors Pande, Sebastian Doniach, Kevin W. Plaxco and collaborators. His postdoctoral stay at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH in Zurich, Switzerland (2004-2007) involved working with professors Wilfred F. van Gunsteren and Phillipe Huenenberger on different topics in computational biophysics ranging from free energy calculations to polymer physics to experimental interpretation.
Currently, dr. Žagrović is using computational methods to study structure and dynamics of the intrinsically unfolded proteins, the role of entropy in enzymatic activation and the problem of conformational averaging in biomolecular structure determination.
Dr. Žagrović was a recepient of the Pacem in Terris Scholarship, John Harvard Scholarship, Howard Hughes Predoctoral Fellowship, Lucille P. Markey Predoctoral Fellowship, EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowship, BCATS Sun Microsystems Award and the McGraw-Hill Italia Award of the Protein Society. His work is currently funded by the Unity Through Knowledge Fund grant 1A and the EMBO Installation grant given by the National Science Foundation of Croatia.