Snežana Kojić is a Full Research Professor and Head of the Muscle Cellular and Molecular Biology Group at the IMGGE, where she has been employed since 1992. Since 2023, she has also served as Chair of the Institute’s Scientific Council. From 2017 to 2025, she served as a member or chair of the Ethics Committee for the Welfare of Experimental Animals at IMGGE, and she is one of the co-founders of the registered zebrafish breeding facility at the Institute.
Her current research focuses on various aspects of the structure and function of striated muscle. Utilizing the zebrafish as a model organism known for its exceptional regenerative capacity, her work explores comparative molecular mechanisms underlying heart regeneration and skeletal muscle repair. Although differing in their injury response mechanisms, the heart and skeletal muscle share numerous similarities, including involvement of the immune response, extracellular matrix remodeling, and conserved signaling pathways. Insights from this research may inform the development of therapeutic strategies for restoring damaged muscle tissues in mammals.
She was the principal investigator of the ZEBARR project, funded by the IDEAS program of the Science Fund of the Republic of Serbia, which was dedicated to identifying shared and tissue-specific transcriptional programs activated during heart regeneration and skeletal muscle repair, and to uncovering the regulatory role of one of the key shared components of these two processes. Her team offers expertise built on the intersection of regenerative biology, molecular cardiology, and translational research in the areas of cardiovascular drug development, regenerative medicine and tissue engineering initiatives, exercise physiology and rehabilitation science and partnerships for zebrafish model-based screening platforms.
Dr. Kojić is the author of the monograph “Structure and Dynamics of the Sarcomere”, published in 2017. She has supervised four PhD theses and is currently supervising one more. Since 2007, she has been actively involved in the doctoral program in Molecular Biology at the Faculty of Biology, University of Belgrade, where she is an accredited mentor.
