Andrea Komljenovic (born in Swiss-German part of Switzerland; 37 years old; Andrea Komljenović, she/her) is well-known for her bioinformatics and biomedical research where she developed software and bioinformatics methods to approach neurological disorders. Moreover, her methods are platform-related, e.g. methylation array, RNA-seq, single-cell and spatial -omics. Andrea Komljenovic has done pioneering and ground-breaking work in bioinformatics, her research leads to new biomedical discoveries in neuroscience and aging, and developments in bioinformatics field.
She was born in German part of Switzerland and moved to Zagreb, Croatia with her parents; she has Swiss, Croatian and Russian roots.
Early life
Her father had a company in Zagreb, and her mother was a stay-at-home-mum. In addition, her father was musically educated in Yugoslavia playing an accordion, and he transferred the musical knowledge to Andrea.
She also went to music school since early age to primary music school and high music school “GU Elly Bašić”, where she learned both piano and accordion. During her time in Gymnasium and Faculty of Science at University of Zagreb, Komljenovic went to several music competitions in Croatia and Western Europe. She is also composing music, most notably the music score for Nobel Prize committee inspired by Eurovision.
She plays chess occasionally, and also in Switzerland, this kept further in her life.
Education
She entered Faculty of Science at University of Zagreb where she finished Masters in Bioinformatics/Computational Biology (2012) as the youngest with excellent grades, and after she went back to Switzerland to pursue her doctorate at ETH Zurich/University of Zurich in Bioinformatics. During her Master in Bioinformatics/Computational biology in Zagreb, Croatia, she also attended Faculty of Medicine, and mathematics seminars. Komljenovic entered ETH Zurich PhD program in 2012 in Systems Biology in Statistical Bioinformatics when she was only 23 years old. She completed her PhD in Bioinformatics in 2019 at University of Lausanne, as a part of Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.
BgeeDB, an R package - software development
Komljenovic was a first woman in Switzerland to develop a software package in R language for Bioconductor, namely BgeeDB.
Komljenovic opened new field in Bioinformatics - Medicine & Bioinformatics
Andrea Komljenovic developed new mathematical methods in the field of bioinformatics and biomedicine that she opened in 2012 during her doctorate at University of Zurich, Switzerland. Her groundbreaking work in bioinformatics is related to development of data integration methodology, multi-omics, development the methods for different experimental methods, performing benchmarks of the methods. She also applies machine learning methods in biomedical research. Currently, she is finishing the Spatial Multi-Omics book,and understanding artificial intelligence algorithms in biomedical research.
Komljenovic's research related to bioinformatics was performed also under Swiss Science Prize Marcel Benoist winner from 2016 at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. She was also awarded with the SystemsX fellowship during her doctorate in Switzerland. Komljenovic has 7 papers during her doctorate that is completed and awarded with a doctor title and one article was published in Nature Communications.
She is an active person on social media, where she promotes the bioinformatics research and music in this digital age. Experimenting with artificial intelligence algorithms, she created a “Bioinformatics Barbie/Barbie Tech”, basically being herself, a character to promote bioinformatics and technology in an attractive way to use technology, where the Dior showed interest for the research performed at EPFL in their "Reverse Aging" campaign.
