Bojan Zagrovic

AB in Biochemical Sciences, 1997, Harvard University; PhD in Biophysics, 2004, Stanford University; postdoc ETH Zurich

Bojan Zagrovic is a Professor of Molecular Biophysics in the Department of Structural and Computational Biology at University of Vienna. The Zagrovic research group uses computational and theoretical methods, including molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, free energy calculations and structural bioinformatics to study fundamental aspects of macromolecular structure, dynamics and interactions, in close collaboration with experimentalists. Specifically, they develop and use computational techniques to analyze conformational entropy and its role in biomolecular interactions. Moreover, they ask how physicochemical properties of biomolecules affect their behavior in crowded environments with a focus on the fundamental principles behind the formation of liquid, phase-separated compartments in the cell. Finally, they employ computational biology methods to study the physicochemical underpinnings of RNA-protein interactions. In particular, they explore the influence of intrinsic binding propensities between nucleotides and amino acids on the specificity in interactions between the two biopolymers. Bojan Zagrovic has supervised a total of 7 PhD students (6 graduated, 1 in progress). He was awarded Tomorrow’s PI Award by Genome Technology, is a member of Junge Kurie of Austrian Academy of Sciences, while his work has been supported by an ERC Starting Independent and ERC Proof of Concept grants.