Roman Jerala

Roman Jerala (born 1962) is a Slovenian biochemist and synthetic biologist, best known as the leader of Slovenian teams that won the grand prize at the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition several times. Born in Jesenice, he studied at the University of Ljubljana, where he took his doctorate and is a full professor, and he heads the Department of Synthetic Biology and Immunology at the National Institute of Chemistry in Ljubljana. In 2013 Nature Chemical Biology reported his team design of a protein that folds itself into a tetrahedron, which could serve as a nanoscale container for drugs. He was elected to Academia Europaea and to EMBO in 2017 and to the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.