Education:

> 2008 Dipl. Ing. Management, Slovak Technical University (SK)

> 2006 Ph.D. Biochemistry, University of Kuopio (FI)

> 2001 M.Sc. Biochemistry, Comenius University (SK)

Ferdinand Molnár is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology at Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan. He earned his MSc in Biochemistry from Comenius University in Bratislava (2001) and his PhD in Biochemistry, with minors in Pharmacology and Bioinformatics, from the University of Kuopio, Finland (2006). His path since has crossed four countries: a postdoc at the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology in Illkirch, France (2006 to 2008), a return to Finland for a decade of research and lab leadership at the University of Eastern Finland, rising to Senior Researcher and laboratory head, and, since 2018, his move to Kazakhstan.

Prof. Molnár's research asks how cells read chemical signals and act on them. He studies mammalian transcriptional regulation and the cellular signaling driven by nuclear receptors in health and disease, down to the molecular handshakes involved: how ligands meet proteins, proteins meet proteins, and proteins meet DNA. What sets his work apart is that he refuses to pick a side of the traditional divide in biology. He pairs classical wet-lab experiments with heavy in-silico methods, moving fluidly between the bench and the machine. That combination extends into cheminformatics, drug discovery, protein design and engineering, and machine learning applied to chemistry, all pointed at the same target: preclinical drug development.