Bijvoet PhD candidate of the Year 2019 - Tomislav Caval

Tomislav Caval was recently selected as Bijvoet PhD Candidate of the Year 2019 by the Scientific Advisory Board of the Bijvoet Centre for Biomolecular Research.

The PhD work of Tomislav, performed in the Biomolecular Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics group, has had a major impact in glycoproteomics, a field that is compared to proteomics still embryonic. Tomislav is helping it to shape. By developing new analytical approaches and software he improved the mass spectrometric analysis of intact glycoproteins allowing him to obtain detailed quantitative glycosylation profiles of intact antibodies, and other protein biopharmaceutics such as erythropoietin. Such analyses are essential for bioengineering efforts to make biobetters and to distinguish biosimilars. Additionally, he developed and applied new methods to detect specifically phospho-mannosylated proteins, a distinct signal targeting them to the lysozyme. With his exciting new methods, and being a friendly and cooperative person, he attracted a lot of collaborators to Utrecht from both industry (ProteinMetrics, Genentech, Roche) and academia (Clausen, Copenhagen; Boons, UU; Bonten, UMCU; Monash, Australia) and presented his work at various international workshops and conferences. Tomislav will next pursue a post-doc career at Stanford University joining the group of Carolyn Bertozzi.

On November 20, 2019, Tomislav defended his thesis and under normal circumstances, Tomislav would have given a presentation the annual Bijvoet Symposium. Because the Bijvoet Symposium was cancelled in 2020 due to the coronavirus crisis, a separate seminar will be organized in the near future, where Tomislav will present his PhD research to the Bijvoet Centre and all other interested people.