Mirna Šitum, academician
Academician Mirna Šitum was born in 1962 in Cista Provo. She graduated from the Medical Faculty in Zagreb in 1985, after which she worked as a physician at the Emergency Medical Service in Split until 1991. From 1991 until the end of 1993, she volunteered in the Homeland War, as an active officer in the Croatian Army, serving in the IV Guards Brigade. Since 1996, she has been a specialist in dermatology and venereology, and since 2004, a specialist in the subfield of dermatologic oncology. Since 2000 she has been the head of the Deparment of Dermatovenereology at Sestre Milosrdnice University Hospital Centre, and since 1999, the head of the Department of Dermatovenerology at the School of Dental medicine, University of Zagreb.
She teaches and is the program director of several courses in postgraduate doctoral and specialized studies at the School of Medicine, School of Dental Medicine and Faculty of Pharmacy and Biochemistry of the University of Zagreb. She is a visiting professor at the Medical Faculty of Josip Juraj Strossmayer University in Osijek and at the Medical Faculty of the University of Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, where she has been involved in its establishment from the outset. From 2009 to 2018 she served as the president of the Croatian Dermatovenereological Society of the Croatian Medical Association (CMA) and since 2019 she has been the president of the Croatian Society for Dermatological Oncology of the CMA and the president of the Central South Eastern European Melanoma Expert Group (CSEEMEG) of the European Melanoma Registry (EuMelaReg).
To date, she has organized 108 scientific and professional national and international conferences and has been an invited speaker at 242 international and national conferences with international participation. She has published 891 publications, including 239 scientific papers, of which 134 were published in journals indexed in the Web of Science. She is the editor of 36 books and has authored 105 chapters to 37 books edited by other national and foreign editors. She has participated in 17 scientific projects and is a member of editorial boards of 9 different scientific journals, as well as 10 international professional societies, the European expert group “Euromelanoma,” and the global Vitiligo Research Foundation. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the European Association of Dermato- Oncology She is the founder and the head of the three Reference Centers of the Ministry of Health of the Republic of Croatia – Reference Center for Melanoma, Reference Center for Dermoscopy, and the Reference Center for Chronic Wounds, as well as the Vitiligo Biobank. She is a mentor for 24 doctoral dissertations and the head of the specialist training program at the Ministry of Health of the Republic of Croatia, as well as the chair of the Commitee for Dermatovenereology at the Ministry of Health. She has received numerous acknowledgments related to the Homeland War and awards, diplomas, and acknowledgments from the Croatian Medical Association, as well as the Award from the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the State Prize for Science. She a leading dermato-oncologist in Croatia, with substantial international recognition in the fields of dermatologic oncology and psychodermatology, where she stands out as the most productive and cited author in the country. In 2018 she was elected a full member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts.