Julius Lukeš

Biosketch

Julius Lukeš, PhD is principal investigator at the Institute of Parasitology, Biology Centre, Czech Academy of Sciences, and Professor at the Faculty of Sciences, University of South Bohemia. He earned RNDr (Rerum Naturalium Doctor) from Charles University, and PhD from the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Czech Academy of Sciences, University of Amsterdam, University of California, Riverside, and visiting scientist at the UCLA, and a senior fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He is a member of the Czech Learned Society, a fellow of the American Academy for Microbiology, the European Academy of Microbiology, the AAAS, the European Molecular Biology Organization, and the NAS. He has been President of the International Society for Evolutionary Protistology, and is President elect of the International Society of Protistologists. Awards include prize of the Czech Minister of Education, and J.G. Mendel Medal for Achievements in Natural Sciences.

Research Interests

Dr. Lukeš’s primary interest is functional analysis of a wide range of proteins of the kinetoplastid parasite Trypanosoma brucei, the free-living flagellate Diplonema papillatum, and few other protists. He is also interested in the evolution of the mitochondrion, in the phylogeny of unicellular eukaryotes with focus on the eukaryotic supergroup Discoba, in RNA editing and the kinetoplast DNA, in the role of bacterial endosymbionts in protists, in heme and iron-sulfur cluster metabolism, as well as in the host-parasite relationships in general. He likes to popularize science for the general public.