Maks Deranja

After all my early life being fascinated with biology, especially evolution and entomology, I went off to the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Science. There I earned a title of a Bachelor in Biology, and now I am finishing my master's thesis. In the last two years, alongside my team, I started writing scientific papers about grasshoppers and cricket (Orthoptera), my biggest passion of all branches of biology. My colleague Karmela Adžić and I in partnership with the University of Malaya in 2019 organized and conducted an expedition to peninsular Malaysia where we researched Orthoptera. The expedition lasted 30 days, but unfortunately, the results still aren't published due to complications caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, in the summer of 2020, Karmela and I focused on local research of Orthoptera, so we started a two-year project researching the Orthoptera of Adriatic islands. The first year of research gave us a lot of interesting results, but due to two strong earthquakes that struck Zagreb and surrounding areas, we couldn't access the damaged University building, so publishing those results will also have to wait a bit more. We did a lot of work in really difficult conditions which gave us valuable experience that will make all our further scientific ventures noticeably improved. I the future, I plan to constantly improve on every aspect of doing scientific work, and by doing so, bring a lot of advancements in knowledge about my field of research.

January 2021