I was born in Slovenia on 30. July 1967. As I already said on the first page, I work as a scientist in the field of molecular neuroendocrinology. I graduated at Veterinary school at University of Ljubljana in 1992. In 1994 I was awarded M.Sc. at the same school, although at the end of 1993 I already went to Edinburgh, Scotland, to be a graduate student at MRC – Reproductive biology unit (now MRC – Human reproductive sciences unit) working with Dr. Philippa Saunders. I was awarded a Ph.D. in medicine from the Medical School at University of Edinburgh in 1996. Edinburgh and Scotland are great place to live, and I have many fond memories of those three years.
After working for 2 years back home in Slovenia, I decided to go abroad for a little longer, this time to the University of Texas, Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, USA, one of the best Medical schools in the USA, where I worked with Dr. Keith Parker. I returned back to Slovenia in 2001, where I worked to established my own research group. Our main research interest is sexual differentiation of the brain, we are studying how genes in addition to hormones influence the development of sex differences between male and female brains (yes, they are different). e are also studying long lasting effects of stress in prenatal and postnatal periods for behaviour in adult life. Another area in which we are interested are endocrine disruptors, we have been recently studying possible hormonal effects of several environmental pollutants including Atrazine. If you are interested in more detailed description of my research, click here.
Few years ago we have also started to develop a method of using adult stem cells for treating joint problems and horses. The method is very successful and my research group received several national prizes for this development. To spread this method to as many suffering animal patients as possible , we have establish spin-out company Animacel, which now offers stem cell treatments in four different countries and we hope we will soon being able to offer help to dogs in horses in other countries.
Here you can get a list of my publications in peer reviewed journals.
Beside scientific articles, I also published more than 50 popular science articles in different Slovenian newspapers and magazines. For writing popular articles, I received in 2004 the prize for the best science writer, awarded by the largest Slovenian newspaper Delo (you can read an article and interview (in Slovenian language) about this award here) and in 2010 award Proteus from Slovenian National Science Fundation for excellency in communicating science to general public.
Here are also links to some of my articles in Slovenian langauge:
Is sex difference in child play genetically determined?
Do we really only use 10 % of our brain?