prof. dr hab. Ryszard Kierzek

  • Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences
 

Since 1974 he has been at the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Poznań, and is currently the head of the unit’s Department of Structural Chemistry and Biology of Nucleic Acids. He graduated in 1974 from the Faculty of Chemistry, Adam Mickiewicz University. He defended his doctorate dissertation in 1978, under the supervision of Professor Maciej Wiewiórowski. In 1988 he was conferred with a habilitation degree, and since 2000 he has held the title of professor of chemistry. His research interests include different aspects of RNA, such as the chemical synthesis of natural and modified RNA, DNA, LNA, 2’-O-methyl RNA oligonucleotides, thermodynamic and structural properties of natural and modified RNA, as well as regulation of biological processes involving RNA. This large-scale research seeks to inhibit biological activity of pathogenic RNAs related to human diseases, by way of learning the correlation between RNA’s structure and function. Professor Kierzyk has been the principal investigator in numerous research grants, and in the past five years he has led six research projects. He has nearly 150 publications in his portfolio, and has been quoted more than 6,300 times, with an h-index of 40.

He has held more than a dozen scientific fellowships in the United States, totalling approximately nine years in length. He has worked at the City of Hope National Medical Center, University of Colorado in Boulder and University of Rochester, among others. For his research from 1999-2005 he was twice granted a research scholarship by the Fogarty International Research Collaboration Award (FIRCA), National Institutes of Health (NIH). In the years 2004-2008 he was a member of a review committee at the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP), based in Strasbourg, awarding research grants. The committee was comprised of 24 members from all over the world, with professor Kierzek being the only representative of scientists from Central and Eastern Europe on the committee. In 2008, he received the MASTER/MISTRZ Professorial Grant from the Foundation for Polish Science (FNP); in 2015 the same foundation awarded him with a Sabbatical Fellowship. Since 2010 he has been a member of the editorial board of Nucleic Acids Research. He is also the author of several papers published in Forum Akademickie and Spray Nauki on the evaluation of scientific publishability and an Officer of the Order Polonia Restituta.