Congratulations to Professor Nataša Pržulj from the Department of Computer Science, who has been elected Member of the Academia Europaea in 2017.

Since 1988, Academia Europaea has been an international, nongovernmental association joining together world-leading scientists and scholars from across various disciplines, including the humanities, social sciences, life sciences, mathematics, informatics, physics, engineering, and earth and chemical sciences. Its 4000 members are recognised by their peers as experts and leaders in their subject fields.

The Association largely provides advice to European institutions, governments and international agencies on matters relating to science, scholarship and academic life in Europe. It promotes public education in these subjects, as well as publishing the European Review through Cambridge University Press.

Nataša Pržulj is a professor of biomedical data science. Her research mines ‘big data’ to extract new information for increasing biomedical knowledge. She studies the wiring patterns of large and complex omics networks, disease ontologies, clinical patient data, drug-drug and drug-target interaction networks, seeing them as sources of information that can complement genetic sequence data. This data is then interpreted for deeper biomedical insight.

In 2013 Professor Pržulj was elected into the Young Academy of Europe. She has been a British Computer Society fellow since 2013, and was awarded the 2014 British Computer Society Roger Needham Award in recognition of the potential her research has to revolutionise health and pharmaceutics.

She received a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) grant for her project Biological Network Topology Complements Genome as a Source of Biological Information for 2012-2017.

Adding to this, Professor Pržulj held a USA analogue to an ERC Starting Grant, a prestigious NSF Career Award, for the project titled Tools for Analyzing, Modeling, and Comparing Protein-Protein Interaction Networks in 2007-2011 at the University of California, Irvine. Her research has also been supported by large governmental and industrial grants, including from GlaxoSmithKline, IBM and Google.

Read more about Professor Nataša Pržulj.