I was born in the summer of 1981 in Split (Croatia), where I spent the first 19 years of my life. After completing secondary school (gymnasium), in the year 2000, I went to Mostar (Bosnia and Herzegovina) to study medicine at the Croatian University of Mostar. During the first years of medical school, I have done social community work by assisting primary medical care in refugee camps in Herzegovina, where the war had stopped five years earlier. The love for microbiology passed on to me by my mentors during secondary school education continued and found support during university education not just in Mostar but also at Zagreb University Hospital (Croatia) where I first got in contact with molecular microbiology. I have completed the clinical part of my studies (2005-07) in Heidelberg Medical School, after which I took a year off and worked as a graduate student (2007-08) at the Department of Infectious Diseases in the University Hospital Heidelberg. During this time I started my work in immunology and infectious diseases where I finished my doctoral work (TITLE: A role of type I IFN and pDC in immune defense against S. aureus) under the direct supervision of Isabelle Bekeredjian-Ding and mentorship of Klaus Heeg. All along I was surrounded by immunologists, and I was able to acquire knowledge about the other side of microbial interaction - the host.
