Dr. Igor Štagljar is one of the leading Croatian molecular biologists.Living and working outside Croatia, Dr. Štagljar readily offered to cooperate scientifically, through this Fund, with the most talented students from the Department of Biology of the Faculty of Science, University of Zagreb, where he himself had graduated in molecular biology.
His scientific journey led him to the Swiss Federal School of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, where he received his PhD degree in molecular biology. Afterwards he undertook two post-doctoral positions. The first was at
the University of Zurich, where he studied the RNA polymerase II transcription in mammals and various aspects of DNA replication and repair in yeast and human cells. He then went on to work at the University of Washington in Seattle, in Dr. Stanley Fields’ laboratory, where he contributed to a further development of the MYTH method for biomedical research. In 2005 he started working in Canada, where he accepted an Associate Professor position at the Department of Biochemistry and the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto.
In 2010, Igor Štagljar was promoted to the rank of Full Professor. His lab, situated in the Donnelly Centre, boasts a large team of scientists doing interdisciplinary research. Igor Štagljar has won several Croatian and international scientific awards and is a member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He is also a member of the Editorial boards of BioTechniques, Molecular Genetics and Genomics, BMC Biotechnology, Journal of Molecular Biology, Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications and Molecular Systems Biology. He is a co-founder of Dualsystems Biotech in Zurich, Switzerland, and is currently involved in co-founding of Perturba Therapeutics in Toronto, Canada, a biotech company focusing on applications of the artificial intelligence based drug discovery as well as the ammalian Membrane Two-Hybrid (MaMTH) and SIMPL technologies in finding cures for diseases.