Marina is the project leader of POLINFO. She builds computational models of complex biological phenomena, with the goal of understanding the key ingredients pertaining to these phenomena. POLINFO is a research project that focuses on understanding the formation of polymers and the informational content of genetic polymers. The project was developed in the Laboratory of Theoretical Biochemistry (UPR9080) at the French National Research Center (CNRS), where Marina worked with Guillaume Stirnemann.

​

Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Dave Thirumalai at UT Austin (USA), where she developed a model that simulates the spreading of epigenetic markers. Katava earned her PhD from the University Paris Cité (Diderot) while working with Fabio Sterpone (CNRS, France) on the subject of thermophilic proteins. During her undergraduate studies in Chemistry at the University of Zagreb, she spent a year in the laboratory of Gerhard Gompper (Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany). She subsequently did an internship in the laboratory of Paolo De Los Rios (EPFL Lausanne, Switzerland). 

​

Marina is a two-time grantee of the European Commission, at the postdoctoral and undergraduate level, and has won awards at every stage of her career.

​