Dušan Petrović

In which area did you work during your time at FZJ?

At ICS-6: Structural Biochemistry.

What lessons did you learn from your time at the FZJ?

An industrial collaboration during my PhD gave me early insight into how science works outside academia: the pace, the priorities, the questions that actually matter. It confirmed that industry was where I wanted to be. Working in a computational group also instilled a rigorous approach to method selection and the ability to communicate complex results across disciplines, skills that have stayed with me ever since.

Where do you work at the moment and what are you currently doing there?

I currently work as a Computational Drug Designer at Novartis in Basel, Switzerland, where my work sits at the intersection of structural biology, cheminformatics, and AI-driven drug discovery.

Was there anything that prepared you well for your next career step?

My work was computational, but in constant dialogue with experiments. This meant learning to collaborate across disciplines from early on. That, combined with the independence a PhD demands, translated naturally into what industry resaerch needs.

What is the most exciting thing about your job?

The moments when computation reveals something genuinely unexpected, and knowing that, somewhere down the line, it might matter to a patient.

If money and time were no object, what would your next project be?

A unified computational platform that connects molecular mechanismus to clinical outcomes across every major indication, so that finding the right drug molecule becomes a matter of insight rather than luck.

Who would you like to have dinner with and what would you talk about?

Rosalind Franklin. She is someone who made one of the most consequential contributions in the history of science without living to see it recognized. I would want to hear what it was like to do that work, what she thought the molecule meant biologically, and then tell her how the field she helped create turned out.