About

The organizers of 15CHE/9PON come from the University of Ljubljana, the largest and oldest university in Slovenia, based in the capital city of Ljubljana. We come from two different faculties, the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Pharmacy. The Faculty of Medicine was founded in 1919 alongside the University itself; within the Faculty of Medicine, the Department of Chemistry (now: Institute of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics) was founded in 1945. The Faculty of Pharmacy was founded in 1994, although the complete university-level study of pharmacy had been possible at the University of Ljubljana since 1960.

Research in cholinesterases at the University of Ljubljana began in the 1950s with the work of Andrej Oton Župančič, after whom the Faculty of Medicine later named its award for outstanding research work. Researchers from Ljubljana have specialized especially in the kinetics of acetyl- and butyrylcholinesterases and in the study and development of inhibitors, and continue to be active in these areas today. Since the early 2000s, we have also expanded into the study of paraoxonases, focusing on their kinetic properties and the role of paraoxonases in different human diseases.

Not only have we been present at all CHE and CHE&PON conferences since the beginning, we have also organized the Second International Meeting on Cholinesterases, which took place at Bled, Slovenia, in 1983. In the interim, we have participated in the organization of several other large conferences from the field of biochemistry, including the 45th FEBS Congress, which was organized in Ljubljana in 2021.