Dragomir Milovanović

Dragomir Milovanovic is a principal investigator of the Laboratory for Molecular Neuroscience within the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases at the Charité University Clinic in Berlin.

Dragomir investigates the mechanisms behind the organization and dynamics of synaptic vesicles at the nerve terminal. During his postdoc at Yale School of Medicine, Dragomir showed that clusters of synaptic vesicles are an example of a liquid phase. The key feature of proteins that undergo the liquid-liquid phase separation is their property to participate in multivalent, low-affinity interactions often through their intrinsically disordered regions. Interestingly, proteins with the intrinsically disordered regions are implicated in the pathology of many neurodegenerative diseases in which they form insoluble aggregates. With his team, Dragomir is investigating the mechanisms that regulate the interaction of proteins with the intrinsically disordered regions at synapses.

Dragomir did his Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany, in membrane biochemistry and biophysics using the super-resolution microscopy. The fundamental knowledge in science Dragomir received at the Faculty of Chemistry, the University of Belgrade, where he studied biochemistry.

Throughout his education, Dragomir received numerous prices that include the postdoctoral fellowship from the Human Frontier Science Program, the Djordje Stefanovic plaque from the Department of Biochemistry, the Annual Award of the Serbian Chemical Society, the fellowship of the Lindau Foundation and many others.

Dragomir gave invited seminars in the U.S., Germany, the Netherlands, France, China, Japan and, several times in his homeland, Serbia.