University of Rijeka Council

Professor Ivan Svetlik, Ph.D., was born in 1950 in Srednja Kanomlja near Idrij in Slovenia, where he attended high school. He completed his studies in sociology at the University of Ljubljana, where he earned his Ph.D. after further training at the University of Warwick, England, and the Arbetslivecentre in Stockholm. He was dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ljubljana, and vice-rector and rector of the University of Ljubljana. From 2008 to 2012, he held the Minister of Labour and Social Policy position in the Slovenian government. He has also served as president of the National Council for Higher Education, the National Council for Curricular Reform, and the National Council for Vocational Education, and cooperated with the European Training Foundation (ETF). He is the author of more than 400 articles, books, and book chapters, and he was also involved in the Lead international project as one of the authors of the book “University Governance and Leadership in Europe and China”. For cooperation on joint projects, he received an award from KU Leuven.

Blaženka Divjak was born in 1967 in Varaždin. She is a full professor with tenure in the area of Natural Sciences, field Mathematics. She earned her Ph.D. in 1998 at the Faculty of Science of the University of Zagreb (PMF). From 2017 to 2020, she was the Minister of Science and Education in the Government of the Republic of Croatia. During the Croatian presidency of the Council of the European Union (January 2020 – June 2020), she chaired the Council of Ministers in charge of education and research. During her mandate, Croatia became an associate member of CERN and the European Space Agency (ESA), and a curricular reform was introduced in all schools in Croatia. From 2010 to 2014, she was vice-rector for students and studies at the University of Zagreb. She has published more than 150 scientific papers in the fields of mathematics, e-learning, strategic planning and decision-making, learning and design analytics, and artificial intelligence in education.

Teuta Duletić has a Master’s degree in shipbuilding engineering and an MBA with 13 years of experience in shipbuilding. For the third year in a row, she holds the position of Director of Lürssen Design Center Kvarner and Maritime Center of Excellence, Rijeka branches of the famous Lürssen Group. She graduated from the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Rijeka, studied at Cotrugli Business School, and received professional training at University College London, UK, and Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugal. She is interested in innovation ecosystems and engineering excellence. She built her international career working as an Executive Director in the Croatian branch of the American shipbuilding company Metal Shark, a leading supplier of fleet vessels for the US Coast Guard and Navy, and Brodosplit, where she worked as the Head of Sales and Design for the entire Group.

Ivan Đikić was born in Zagreb in 1966. He graduated in medicine at the Faculty of Medicine in Zagreb, where he earned his Ph.D. in the field of molecular biology. He continued his career in New York as a research associate at the Medical Centre. At the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Uppsala, Sweden, he is the head of the laboratory for molecular biology of tumors. Since 2002, he has been a full professor at Goethe University and a member of the Max Planck Institute in Frankfurt, where he also holds the position of director of the Institute for Biochemistry. He is the founder of the Buchmann Institute for Molecular Science (BMLS). He is a member of Leopoldina – German Academy of Sciences, the Council of the European Society for Molecular Biology, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the 2023 recipient of the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine for his contributions to the understanding of ubiquitin functions and ubiquitination mechanisms. He is the first Croatian scientist to receive three European Research Council (ERC) grants. Following the decision of the UNIRI Senate on March 21, 2023, he was awarded the University of Rijeka honorary doctorate.

Academician Željko Kaštelan was born in Rijeka in 1964. He received his primary, secondary, and higher education in Zagreb, where he graduated from the Faculty of Medicine in 1988. He is the head of the Urology Clinic of Clinical Hospital Centre (KBC) Zagreb. In 1990, he started working as an assistant at the Department of Urology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Zagreb, where he advanced to the rank of full professor. He is the head of the Department of Urology and holder of the Urology course in graduate and postgraduate studies. Since 2007, he has been the head of the Urology Clinic of KBC Zagreb, where he founded three Departments: the Department of Kidney Transplantation, the Department of Urology and Reconstructive Urology, and the Department of Endourology. Together with his colleagues, he founded several multidisciplinary centres at KBC Zagreb: the Prostate Centre, the Centre for Bladder Diseases, the Centre for Robotic Medicine, the Centre for Kidney Transplantation, the Centre for Reproductive Medicine and Andrology, and the Centre for Andrology of the European Academy of Andrology. He is the head of the Reference Centre of the Ministry of Health for Urological Oncology and the Centre for Kidney Transplantation at KBC Zagreb. He was president of the Croatian Urological Society for two terms (from 2007 to 2015). Since 2020, he has been a regular member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Danica Kragić Jensfelt was born in 1971 in Rijeka. She has a Master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Faculty of Engineering in Rijeka and a doctorate in computing from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. She was a visiting researcher at Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, and the INRIA Rennes Institute. She is a professor at the School of Computer Science and Communication at KTH and is the director of the Centre for Autonomous Systems. Her research interests include robotics, computer vision, and machine learning. She is working on the development of a sophisticated vision system, as well as an object manipulation and grasping system for robots. Kragić is the winner of the prestigious IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Academic Career Award, and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering. She is an honorary member of IEEE, the world’s largest organization that gathers experts in the field of technology. She also chaired the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Computer and Robot Vision and was a member of the IEEE RAS AdCom. Following the decision of the UNIRI Senate on February 21, 2021, she was awarded the University of Rijeka honorary doctorate.

David Smith was born in 1973 in Dubbo, Australia. He has been the director of the Ruđer Bošković Institute (IRB) in Zagreb since 2018. From 2016 to 2018, he was the head of the Division of Physical Chemistry at IRB. In 2016, he was a special advisor to the Minister of Science, Education, and Sports for Research and Development. For his work at the Institute, he received the Croatian Chemical Society “Lavoslav Ružička” Annual Award for the year 2008 and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Returning Scholarship for the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. He was awarded a DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) postdoctoral grant to work at the Chemistry Department of the Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich, Germany, as well as an Alexander von Humboldt (AvH) Foundation Scholarship to stay and work at the Chemistry Department of the Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich, Germany. In 2000, he received the Dean’s Award in Chemistry for the best dissertation at the Research School of Chemistry, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. He is the recipient of the British Consulate Scholarship for doctoral studies and the Australian Postgraduate Award (APA), founded by the Australian Federal Government, a scholarship awarded to the best students for doctoral studies.