Prof. dr. Zdravko Kačič was born in 1961 in Maribor. He has been employed at the University of Maribor since 1990, as an assistant at what was then the Faculty of Engineering and since 2003 as a full professor at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (FERI) of the University of Maribor. He is the head of the Institute of Electronics and Telecommunications since 2010 and in the period between 2011 and 2015, he was vice-rector of the University of Maribor for financial matters. In the academic year 2017/2018, he is the lead professor of seven courses in the undergraduate and postgraduate study programmes Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications as well as two courses in the third-cycle (doctoral) study programme Electrical Engineering. His scientific bibliography comprises of more than 650 bibliographic units, among which are 95 articles published in scientific journals, 190 articles in conference proceedings, 10 chapters in monographs and 44 final reports on research results. He is the manager of the research programme Advanced Methods of Interactions in Telecommunications and used to be the manager of several EU research programmes as well as programmes with the industry. He was a visiting researcher at the Technical University of Berlin and a visiting professor at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, as well as at the Umea University, Sweden. He was also invited to lecture at various European universities.

In the years 2010-2014, he was a member of the domain committee COST for the field of information and communication technologies (DC ICT). In 2013, he was appointed to the working group for preparing the Higher Education Funding Act at the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport of the Republic of Slovenia. In 2016, he was appointed to the working group for the support of the project Expert Consulting on Higher Education Funding in Slovenia at the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport of the Republic of Slovenia.

Upon his appointment, the rector of the University of Maribor prof. dr. Zdravko Kačič, emphasised that “with its performance, the University has to justify the confidence of the broader society in fulfilling its mission“.