• Through a Comtrade scholarship to a career in bioinformatics
News

In August 2016, Marija Djurdjević was the first student to graduate with a master’s degree in the second-cycle study programme Computer and Information Science through a scholarship from the company Comtrade and the Faculty of Computer and Information Science.
Marija came to FRI from Serbia, where she gained her bachelor’s degree. We talked to her about her experience of studying at FRI and her research and career in bioinformatics, which she is pursuing in Austria.

 

A scholarship for master’s degree students is being offered by Comtrade and UL FRI for the 2017/2018 academic year. The application deadline is 31 August 2017.

Studies in Slovenia

Marija, after gaining your undergraduate degree in Belgrade, why did you decide to continue to the next level in Slovenia? How did you hear about the scholarship from Comtrade and FRI?

My basic degree gave me broad knowledge in the area of managing information systems, but my programming skills were lacking. I wanted to make up for this lack at a different university in another country and get a bit more experience in life. I chose Slovenia. The Comtrade scholarship was an additional reason for choosing the University of Ljubljana, and I found out about it by chance when I was searching through the offers for study abroad.

 

How hard is it for a student from Serbia to decide to go and study abroad?

I have always wanted to live abroad. In general I’m not afraid of new environments and changes, but I did have some fear about whether I was capable enough and could meet the scholarship requirements, although if you have sufficient desire and motivation, everything is possible. But it does seem to me that students from Serbia are not in the habit of studying abroad. The possible reason is having to get a visa, which hinders the application process, and the higher costs of studying abroad, which the average family in Serbia would find it hard to afford. Fortunately with the Erasmus programmes and other scholarships this is gradually changing.

 

How was it adjusting to the new environment?

There was not a lot of time to adjust. I only found out that I had been accepted for the master’s course at FRI a few days before the course started. I had very little time to arrange a lot of things, find a place to live and sort out my visa and other documents. Because the programme and its requirements started immediately, the actual adjustment was in a way by direct method. I remember my first day at the Faculty and my first lecture in Slovenian. I understood almost nothing, but it was still interesting. After just a few weeks I got used to it and understood the lectures, and after two months I started speaking Slovenian myself.

 

How did you integrate into the new society, was it hard making friends?

I came to study in a second-cycle master’s programme, where the majority of students at the Faculty knew each other from before, so as a foreigner I made my first connections with other students from abroad. It was easier for us to understand each other, since we were in the same position, a new environment with a foreign language. But that was just at the beginning. As soon as the course requirements, midterm exams and projects started up, we started spontaneously mingling, getting to know each other and sharing knowledge and information.  Socialising gradually extended outside the Faculty, and together we would go for drinks, have picnics and parties and so on.

 

What similarities and differences did you notice between the way of studying in Serbia and Slovenia? What new knowledge will help you most in your career?

Studying in Serbia is very different from Slovenia. Studying in Slovenia is better because it keeps up with the latest topics in the field of computer science and is more innovative. The lectures and practicals themselves are very interactive, the students are motivated to participate and you work on projects based on real data. Alongside programming knowledge and experience, at FRI I developed the ability to analyse data and apply algorithmic thinking, and I gained very important skills in the area of artificial intelligence, machine learning and bioinformatics, which are also my top areas of interest, and which I am involved in now.

 

During your course, how did you collaborate with Comtrade?

Comtrade supported me financially through the scholarship, and I also did a month-long internship with them, where I tested the module that the company developed for Microsoft’s SharePoint. This gave me the opportunity to become familiar with the working environment and pleasant atmosphere at the company, to get a taste of how it is to work in a team and to collaborate on a big IT project.

 

The scholarship was offered specifically to women. What is your view of the male-female balance in IT professions? As a woman computer scientist did you ever feel at a disadvantage?

In the IT field there are definitely fewer women than men – in the master’s course too, there were very few girls – but it does seem to me that with the increasing popularity of the field, this is slowly changing. I myself believe that both genders should be represented equally. I do not feel disadvantaged as a woman in computer science. It even seems to me that I had more attention and help from my fellow students. But I never got the feeling that anyone thought I was less capable when it came to doing or programming something. We worked as equals on projects and assignments.

 

Research in the field of bioinformatics

What did you work on in your master’s thesis?

Although medical science has made great progress in the past few decades in understanding cancer, mortality owing to that disease is still high. One key factor in predicting the patient’s clinical outcome is the detection of subtypes in an individual type of cancer. The aim of my master’s thesis was to use methods deriving from computer topology to determine subtypes in an individual type of cancer and to predict the patient’s clinical outcome.

 

Will you be using the findings from your thesis and the methodology in your further work? Could your findings contribute to the more rapid detection of cancer?

Given that topological methods have barely started being used in bioinformatics, there is a lot of scope for further research. The method we developed in the master’s thesis constitutes a state of the art method, first used in data on gene expression in cancer tissue. Since we obtained very interesting results, of course I want to test the functioning of the method on other data. As we know, cancer is a very complex disease, where the causal factors and the actual development of the disease are hard to define. For this reason it is difficult for me to say whether the method we developed will help in the more rapid detection of the disease. Yet in any event it will help us understand the disease better. Categorising patients into smaller subgroups will help in formulating personalised approaches to treating cancer.

 

You are continuing your career in Austria. Could you describe briefly what you are doing in Graz and how the knowledge you acquired at FRI is helping you in this?

At the Centre for Medical Research at the Medical University of Graz I am working as a bioinformatics specialist. One of my first tasks was to set up the entire IT infrastructure for bioinformatic analysis. In this my familiarity with Linux administration and parallel processing proved very useful. One of my duties is to maintain the server, where I integrate existing bioinformatics tools or develop and integrate my own algorithms. Another duty is to actually analyse bioinformatic data in combination with various algorithms. The skills I apply in this were for the most part acquired at FRI.