Prof. Robert Zorec University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Robert Zorec is Professor of Pathophysiology at the University of Ljubljana's Medical Faculty. He is a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the Academia Europaea. He was a PhD student at the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Medical Faculty, UK and at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He did a... read morepost-doc as a Wellcome Trust Fellow in Cambridge and started his own laboratory in 1991 at the Institute of Pathophysiology, Medical Faculty in Ljubljana. This lab merged with the labs at the Celica Biomedical Center, Technology Park in 2000 and by establishing the Carl Zeiss Reference Center for Confocal Microscopy (1999 and 2006). His research interest has been electrophysiology and cell physiology where he developed, independently of the Nobel Laureate Erwin Neher in Goettingen, the high-resolution membrane capacitance measurements to study elementary properties of exocytosis, involving the fusion of vesicle membrane with the plasma membrane. As model systems he used single pituitary, mast, liver, neurones, plant protoplasts, adipocytes and other cells. His recent interest is vesicle traffic and regulated exocytosis in astrocytes, where the lab developed new optical methods to study subcellular vesicle traffic, single cell metabolism and secondary messenger activation. In addition to basic research focusing into physiological and pathological problems, the lab is also developing advanced cell-based medicines such asb hybridoma cells to treat cancer. The labs operate as GMP facilities and are compliant with ISO/SIST 17025 standards.