Izabela Makałowska

Professor Izabela Makałowska is a Professor of Biological Sciences and Director of the Institute of Biology and Human Evolution at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland. Prof. Makałowska is also a CEO of bioinformatics and genetics in a bioinformatics company, ideas4biology, founded in 2013. She defended her PhD thesis in Biology in 1992 at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland. Since then, she has led numerous studies on epigenomics, gene expression, and gene regulation in a wide range of species, from plants to humans. With her research group, she is actively developing various biological databases, such as for histone sequences, DNA sequences, chloroplast genome, microRNAs, retrogenes, and 5’end protein-coding overlapping genes. Some of her most recent publications include developing a comprehensive annotation of human long noncoding RNAs (DOI: 10.1016/j.bbagrm.2019.05.003) and summarizing retrogenes’ involvement in cancer and evolution (DOI: 10.3390/life11010072).