Péter Tompa

Peter Tompa received his PhD in biochemistry and enzymology from ELTE University, Budapest in 1991. Currently, he is the director of VIB (Flanders Institute of Biotechnology) Structural Biology Research Center (SBRC), Brussels, and a professor of biochemistry at the VUB (Free University Brussels). He also holds the position of professor of biochemistry and protein sciences in the Institute of Enzymology, Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary. He has research groups both in Brussels and Budapest. His research focuses on intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs): he played an active and decisive role in the rise of this field by suggesting a functional classification of IDPs, observing the role of structural disorder in chaperone function and developing basic concepts of the unusual modes of function of IDPs (such as moonlighting, fuzziness, disordered domains, supertertiary structure, multisteric regulation, conformational signaling, etc…). He published 132 papers (about 50 of which are related to structural disorder), 10 book chapters, and the first monograph of the field “Structure and function of intrinsically disordered proteins” (2009) by Taylor and Francis, Inc. (CRC Press). His work received about 6500 citations (ISI), his H-index is 35. He has been an invited speaker at about 100 international meetings, such as the first IDP subgroup meeting at the “51st Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society” in Baltimore, USA (2007), and the Gordon Research Conference on Intrinsically Disordered Proteins (2014). He organized the first conference of the IDP field, the EMBO workshop “Intrinsically unfolded proteins: from structure to function” in Budapest, Hungary (2007).