People

Barbara has a background in pharmacy and received her PhD in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the University of Vienna in 2006 (Gerhard F. Ecker’s lab) focusing mainly on QSAR modeling for P-glycoprotein. During her PhD studies, Barbara also spend some time in Jordi Mestres’ group at IMIM-UPF, Barcelona, Spain. She performed her postdoctoral studies at the University of Düsseldorf, Germany (Hans-Dieter Höltje’s lab) from 2006-2007,  performing structure-based modeling of DNA polymerase alpha. Barbara contributed to many EU-funded projects (eTOX, OpenPHACTS, EU-ToxRisk) and is leading a nationally funded FWF project focusing on hepatic OATPs since 2017. In December 2019, Barbara accomplished her Venia Docendi in Pharmacoinformatics at the University of Vienna.

Barbara’s research is concentrated on integrating Data Science approaches into the Computational Molecular Design process. She focuses on off-targets (mainly hepatic uptake transporters of the SLC family), and develops automatized computational techniques to link heterogeneous data sources, perform bioactivity profiling, and generate predictive models – especially for toxicity predictions. In addition, Barbara is interested in large-scale data analyses including time trend analyses by utilizing public domain data.

In addition to her role as a group leader at the University of Vienna, Barbara is working as a safety data scientist for EMBL-EBI, Hinxton, UK. In this role Barbara is contributing to Open Targets, a project which aims to enable systematic target identification and prioritization.

Yordan is a Master student doing his degree in ‘Drug Discovery and Development’. He has been working in the group of B. Zdrazil since August 2020 – first doing an internship and now his master thesis. His main area of interest is Data Science/ Cheminformatics. His master thesis is on the development of a new computational workflow using public data sets to support the discovery and establishment of AOPs (Adverse outcome pathways).
Yordan obtained his Bachelors in ‘Pharmaceutical Science’ from the University of Salford, UK, in 2018. His Bachelor thesis was based on investigating the chemistry of silyl substituted aromatics.

Mert is a master student who is enrolled in his last semester of the programme “Drug Discovery and Development” at the University of Vienna. From December 2020 to February 2021, he did a two-month internship and subsequently started his master thesis in March 2021 in the ZdrazilLab. He is focusing on investigations regarding differences of protein-ligand interaction by molecular docking, comparing human and mouse OCT1. This work is supported by extensive pharmacological studies undertaken by our collaboration partner Mladen Tzvetkov (University of Greifswald).

Mert obtained his BSc in Molecular Life Science at the Department of Chemistry and Pharmacy, Faculty of Sciences, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg in November 2018. His bachelor thesis was focused on performing UV/Vis spectrometric analyses of selected oligoferrocene compounds, with remarkable IC50 values in different cancer cell lines with respect to solubility, stability and ROS release supervised by Dr. Gina Zeh.

Mohamed currently works as a „Quality Operation Specialist“ in a pharmaceutical company and is doing his part – time master degree in „Biotechnological Qualitymanagement“ at the FH Campus Wien. He joined the group of B. Zdrazil in November 2021. In his master thesis he is focusing on data analysis of chemical probes.