About
Vlad Cojocaru was born in Arad, a city located at the western border of Romania and is a leading scientist in the field of computational biochemistry. His scientific career started when he met Tudor Oprea, a leader in the field of computer aided drug design during his master studies at the West University of Timişoara in Romania. During that period, Vlad was accepted in an international M.Sc./Ph.D. graduate school in Molecular Biology in Göttingen, Germany. There Vlad did his Ph.D. studies guided by Tom Jovin and Reinhard Klement at the Max Planck for Multisciplinary Sciences. After obtaining the Ph.D. degree from the University of Göttingen, Vlad continued his career as a postdoctoral fellow of the Klaus Tschira Foundation at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies in the group of Rebecca Wade. Then, he took up a project leader position at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine in Münster, Germany in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology lead by Hans Schöler. During his time in Münster he started developing his own research lines which he continued as a Hubrecht fellow group leader at the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Just before moving to Utrecht he obtained his habilitation (venia legendi) in theoretical chemistry from the University of Münster. In this effort he was mentored by Andreas Heuer. In recent years he has been a senior research research scientist at the University of Utrecht in the Computational Structural Biology group lead by Alexandre Bonvin before taking up a full research professorship at the STAR-UBB Institute of the Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania which is one of the most prestigious universities in Romania and Eastern Europe.
Research interests
Throughout his career, Vlad developed a broad interdisciplinary expertise across chemistry, physics, and biology. He dedicated his scientific career to the goal of decoding the link between the structure and dynamics of biomolecules and their function in cells. He discovered how proteins influence the folding of RNA molecules, how drug metabolizing enzymes embed in lipid membranes and channel drug molecules from and to their active sites, and how specialized proteins that regulate gene expression engage and reshape DNA. For these discoveries, Vlad and his team used various molecular modeling and simulation methods, pushing the boundaries in the applications of these methods. Currently, the focus of his team is in understanding, predicting and redesigning protein-nucleic acid interactions. In particular, Vlad strives to decode the dynamics of structural units present in our genomic DNA and how these are affected by transcription factors, an essential class of gene expression regulators.
Working with BioExcel
Vlad has become ambassador for Romania of Bioexcel in 2023 at the recommendation of Alexandre Bonvin and benefits from the Bioexcel community in pushing the boundaries in the applications of the Bioexcel flagship software Haddock and Gromacs. His team in involved in the application of Haddock to protein-nucleic acid interactions from small protein-RNA complexes to large biomolecular assemblies such as the interactions of transcription factors to nucleosomes which are the fundamental units of our genomic DNA. During the past 3 years, new members of Vlad’s group have benefited from the Bioexcel summer school on biomolecular simulations. Recently Vlad co-organized the Bioexcel workshop in Sofia together with the ambassador for Bulgaria Anela Ivanova. For the future, Vlad aims to coagulate and expand a Romanian community in Computational Structural Biochemistry under the umbrella of Bioexcel. This community will benefit from the events such conferences and training workshops organized by Bioxcel.
Learn more about the BioExcel Ambassador Program
