She was elected to the position of Scientific Advisor in 1989. During her doctoral studies, she spent one year at the University of Tennessee, USA, and from 1979 to 1981 she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Heidelberg. Afterwards, she was on several occasions a visiting scientist at the Universities of Heidelberg and Münster as a fellow of the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Her research focuses on physical-organic chemistry, particularly on computer design and laboratory preparation of organic and organometallic molecules with targeted properties, the study of their electronic structure and reactivity using spectroscopic and quantum-chemical methods, as well as the photodynamics of model biologically active molecules through rigorous multireference and multiconfigurational calculations. More recently, together with her collaborators, she introduced into Croatian research environments modern studies in high-pressure organic chemistry, microwave organic synthesis, mechanochemistry, and the application of organic catalysts in technologically important biodiesel production processes.
She has published 186 original scientific papers in international journals indexed in Current Contents, 7 professional papers, and 12 book chapters with foreign publishers. Her work has been cited more than 2,300 times (according to the WOS database) in primary publications. Together with Z. Maksić, she co-edited the book "Molecules in Natural Science and Medicine. An Enconium for Linus Pauling", Ellis Horwood, 1991, and co-translated with Z. Maksić Linus Pauling’s popular book "How to Live Longer and Feel Better" into Croatian, which went through three editions (1989, 1990, 1997). With Dr. Z. Glasovac, she is a co-author of one Croatian and one EU patent.
For her scientific work, she was awarded the State Prize "Ruđer Bošković" in 1993 and the City of Zagreb Award in 2005. She has lectured in postgraduate chemistry programs at the Faculty of Science, University of Zagreb, and mentored numerous diploma, master’s, and doctoral theses. She has led a number of national and international projects and actively collaborates with many research groups in Europe and beyond. She has participated in numerous national and international scientific meetings with lectures and poster presentations, and also as an invited plenary or section lecturer and session chair.
She has held numerous functions within the Institute and beyond, both nationally and internationally. From 1990 until her retirement in 2010, she was Head of the newly established Laboratory for Physical-Organic Chemistry, and from 2005 to 2008 she served as Head of the Division of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry. From 1999 to 2004 she was Deputy Chair of the Institute’s Scientific Council. Between 2010 and 2013 she was a member of the Board of the Croatian Science Foundation, and she is currently Coordinator of the Standing Committee for Natural Sciences of the Croatian Science Foundation. From 2004 to 2006 she was a member of the National Science Council of Croatia, and from 2005 to 2007 she served as Chair of the Natural Sciences Council of the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports. She is a member of the Croatian Chemical Society (CCS), served as its President from 1998 to 2002, and Vice-President from 2002 to 2004.
On the international level, she was active for many years in the Organizing Committee of the European Symposia on Organic Reactivity (ESOR) and in the IUPAC Subcommittee for Structural and Mechanistic Chemistry. She was also Croatia’s representative on the Management Committee of the COST D30 Action (previously COST D10 from 1999 to 2002). Since 2003 she has been Editor for Physical-Organic Chemistry of the journal Central European Journal of Chemistry, and since early 2006 she has been Associate Editor of the Journal of Physical Organic Chemistry. Previously she was a member of the editorial board of the journal Croatica Chemica Acta, where she served as Assistant Editor from 1977 to 1979. She is a regular reviewer for several scientific journals in the fields of organic and theoretical chemistry.
