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Natasa Przulj

Natasa Przulj

Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación

Life & Medical Sciences

Prof. Przulj is an elected member of Academia Europaea --The Academy of Europe, The Serbian Royal Academy, and a Fellow of the British Computer Society. She is an ICREA Research Professor at Barcelona Supercomputing Center as of January 1st, 2019. In 2014, she was awarded the British Computer Society Roger Needham Award for a distinguished research contribution in computer science by a UK based researcher within ten years of their PhD. She received three prestigious European Research Council (ERC) grants: ERC Consolidator (2018-24), ERC PoC (2020-2022) and ERC Starting (2012-17). She held a prestigious NSF CAREER Award. Her research has also been supported by other large governmental and industrial grants. She has been a Full Professor (2016-now) at UCL, Assoc. Professor (2012-2016) and Assist. Professor (2009-2012) at Imperial College London and an Assistant Prof. at Univ. of California-Irvine (2005-2009). She obtained a PhD in Computer Science from Univ. of Toronto in 2005.


Research interests

Molecular and clinical data integration for precision medicine: patient stratification, biomarker discovery, drug re-purposing, drug discovery, disease re-classification. Data analytics, modeling, fusion, dynamics, applied to clinical, molecular and biological data. Algorithms for uncovering molecular mechanisms of disease from systems-level “omics” data. Molecular networks: interactome evolution, dynamics, alignment, function prediction. Large-scale economic data analysis, fusion and modeling the dynamics of economic systems. Computational graph theory, algorithms, artificial inteligence, models.

Selected publications

– A Xenos, N Malod-Dognin, S Milinković, N Pržulj 2021,’Linear functional organization of the omic embedding space‘, Bioinformatics, Volume 37, Issue 21, Pages 3839–3847.

– Zambrana, Carme; Xenos, Alexandros; Bottcher, Rene; Malod-Dognin, Noel; Przulj, Natasa 2021, ‘Network neighbors of viral targets and differentially expressed genes in COVID-19 are drug target candidates’, Scientific Reports, 11, 1, 18985.

– Thomas Gaudelet, Noël Malod-Dognin, and Nataša Pržulj 2021, ‘Integrative Data Analytic Framework to Enhance Cancer Precision Medicine,‘ Network and Systems Medicine, 4:1, 60-73

– DA Salazar, N Pržulj, CF Valencia 2021, ‘Multi-project and Multi-profile joint Non-negative Matrix Factorization for cancer omic datasets‘, Bioinformatics, 37, 24, 4801 – 4809. 2021.

Selected research activities

  1. Member of the Presidency of the Serbian Society for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BIRBI), appointed in 2021
  2. Scientific Advisory Board member of Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI / Braunschweig, Germany) since 2017, a 3-year post, to which she was re-appointed in 2021
  3. Member of many scientific committees: e.g. of Novo Nordisk, Horizon Europe, ANR, WWTF
  4. Associate editor of: Frontiers in Genetics, Frontiers in Bioinformatics, BMC Bioinformatics
  5. Appointed as Barcelona Ambassador, by the Barcelona City Council, as part of the Barcelona City Brand for international economic promotion strategy, appointed in 2021, 3-year post
  6. PhD student, Thomas Gaudelet, obtained his PhD under Prof. Przulj’s supervision in early 2021 and is now the Associate Director of Machine Learning Research at Relation Therapeutics, a London based startup that uses graph-based  technologies to accelerate drug discovery
  7. Gave 7 invited / keynote talks at the top vennues, e.g. at: Dagstuhl Seminar on Higher-Order Graph Models: From Theoretical Foundations to Machine Learning; EMBL-EBI Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton, UK; ETH Zurich

ICREA Memoir 2021