Analyst, Technology Centre Prague
Daniel Frank works in the Technology Centre Prague at the National Information Centre for European Research Department. Currently, he is the acting editor-in-chief of ECHO magazine and administrator of the Horizon Europe national portal. For the past ten years, he has worked at the TC Prague as an analyst, monitoring the participation of the Czech Republic and EU countries in the FPs.
Analyst, Technology Centre Prague
Vladimír Vojtěch works as an analyst at the National Information Centre for European Research of the Technology Centre Prague. He is a graduate of Charles University – Faculty of Science. His field of study was regional and political geography.
He joined the Technology Centre Prague in June 2022, before that he worked for eight years at the Prague Institute of Planning and Development as a specialist in innovation policy and a specialist in city analysis, focusing on Prague’s research and development milieu and the Prague’s innovation policy with an extension to the economy, measuring economic competitiveness and mapping business activities in the territory of Prague. As a part of his previous work, he also dealt with the issue of the European Structural and Investment Funds.
In the TC Prague he deals with
Professor Maria Leptin is the President of the European Research Council (took office from 1 November 2021).
Prior to that, Professor Leptin served as Director of EMBO from 2010-2021. She also established a research group in Heidelberg at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). The group studies the mechanics of shape determination during development.
After completing her studies in mathematics and biology at the University of Bonn and the University of Heidelberg, Professor Leptin worked for her PhD at the Basel Institute for Immunology, Switzerland (1979-1983) studying B-lymphocyte activation under the supervision of Fritz Melchers.
In 1984 she moved, as a post-doctoral fellow (1984-1987) to the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB), Cambridge, UK, where she started her research on the embryonic development of Drosophila, joining the laboratory of Michael Wilcox. This work laid the foundations for her future work in the field of molecular morphogenesis. In 1988, she was appointed as staff scientist at the same institution. As visiting scientists in Pat O’Farrell's lab at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) she began her work on gastrulation which became the core of her research interests at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany, where she worked as group leader (1989-1994).
In 1994, Maria Leptin became Professor at the Institute of Genetics, University of Cologne, Germany, where she still leads a research group. She spent sabbaticals as a visiting Professor at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France (2001) and as visiting scientist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, UK (2004-2005).
Professor Leptin is an elected member of EMBO, the Academia Europaea and the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), and an Honorary Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. She is also Foreign Member of the Royal Society since May 2022.
Maria LeptinERC Grantee, Palacký University Olomouc
Michal Otyepka studied physical chemistry at Palacký University in Olomouc. Between 2008 and 2020, he headed the Department of Physical Chemistry. He now leads the Regional Center of Advanced Technologies and Materials at the Czech Advanced Technology and Research Institute (CATRIN-RCPTM) and also works in the IT4Innovations national supercomputing center at VŠB-TUO. He is dedicated to the study of the structure and properties of nanomaterials and biomacromolecules. Among other things, he was behind the discovery of the thinnest insulator in the world - fluorographene and participated in the development of the first non-metal magnet. In 2014, he received a Neuron Impuls grant from the Neuron Foundation, in 2015 a grant from the European Research Council (ERC), and in 2020, as the first Czech scientist ever, an ERC Proof of Concept grant. As part of the EIC Transition project, which he has coordinated since 2022, he focuses on the commercial application of nitrogen-doped graphene in supercapacitors.
ERC Grantee, Masaryk Institute and Archive of the CAS
Michal is a senior researcher at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He received his PhD in modern history from the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Charles University in Prague and has held several fellowships and research grants. Intellectually and scientifically, he was informed by the research on multiethnic society in Bohemian Lands and East-Central Europe and critical approach to modern nation states. His PhD thesis (published in Czech in 2007 and in German in 2011) provided a new history of the late 19th century Czech antisemitism. Together with Miloslav Szabó, he co-authored a monograph examining Czech and Slovak antisemitism around 1918, during the First World War and in the process of construction of the Czechoslovak nation state. Michal is active in the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure which aims to improve access to Holocaust-related collections.
Michal’s interest in refugee history started from his research on Czechoslovak reactions to people fleeing Nazi Germany. Together with Kateřina Čapková, he published the Unsichere Zuflucht (2012, in Czech as Nejisté útočiště, 2008), the history of the Czechoslovak refugee policies in the 1930s. The book challenged established narratives which idealised the Czechoslovak approach and largely focused on political and cultural elites rather than the marginalised poor, less connected and/or Jewish refugees. He is the Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator project “Unlikely refuge? Refugees and citizens in East-Central Europe in the 20th century which investigates the continuities and ruptures in refugee reception in East-Central Europe over the 20th century and aims to make refugees at home in the histories of the region.
Michal FranklERC Grantee, Biology Centre CAS
Katerina Sam obtained Master degrees in Biology of ecosystems and in Zoology at University of South Bohemia in Ceske Budejovice in Czech Republic. After that, she continued at the same institution for the Ph.D. in Ornithology, which she obtained in 2013. After that, she was based shortly at University of Copenhagen in Denmark, University of Brisbane and Queensland University in Brisbane in Australia. She returned to Czech Republic in 2017, to establish the Laboratory of Multitrophic Interactions at the Entomology Institute of Biology Centre of Czech Academy of Sciences. The year after that, she received ERC Starting grant nicknamed BABE, which stands for Bird, Ant and Bat Exclosure experiment, and which focuses on the hypothesis Why is the world green. In total, she (co)-authored 75 publications, 61 of them in peer-review journals. Her current H index is 22, and her work was cited 2159 times. Her laboratory has currently 9 PhD students, 2 postdoctoral researchers and 5 technicians. For her research work, she received Martina Roeslova award in 2017, Wichterle award in 2018 and Antzak award in 2019. Recently, in 2022 , Katerina became Head of the Department of Ecology at the Entomology Institute of Czech Academy of Sciences.
During her current work, Katerina Sam focuses on the interactions between plants, their herbivores and trophic cascades. She investigates how the trophic leaves communicate with each other, and how they affect each other. Specifically, she is focused on the effect of predation on the fitness of plants in various habitats and forest strata, which were previously inaccessible to researchers. She conducts her manipulative experiments across large scales, in an experiment spanning from Hokkaido in Japan to Sydney in southern Australia. She often manages large teams, and she also supervises ornithological surveys at large scales across Papua New Guinea as a part of Food and Agriculture Organization.
Kateřina SamZdeněk Strakoš is a member of the Extended Rector's Board for the ERC and Research Development Tools, Charles University. Since 2006, he has been working as a professor at its Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. He studied mathematics at the Czech Technical University (graduated 1981) and then he worked at the Academy of Sciences (then CSAV), where he obtained scientific degrees. Between 1991 and 2000 he worked several years in the USA (IMA, University of Minnesota and Emory University). His main professional interests belong to numerical and computational mathematics. The 2013 monograph entitled Krylov Subspace Methods, Principles and Analysis, published by Oxford University Press (co-authored by Jörg Liesen), has become one of the basic references in the field. Between 2008 and 2015 he served four times in the ERC Advanced Grants panel for Computer Science and Informatics, the last term as a panel chair. He is also recipient of several awards – including SIAM Fellow, Bernard Bolzano Medal and Donatio Universitatis Carolinae.
Zdeněk StrakošMember of the Czech Expert Group to support ERC applicants, CEITEC
Pavel Tomančák is one of the most respected Czech scientists. This top evolutionary and developmental biology expert has been working as a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden since 2005.
His laboratory at the Max Planck Institute is dedicated to studying the regulation and evolution of gene expression during the embryonic development of multicellular organisms. Among other things, his research is unique due to the combination of advanced molecular analysis methods with state-of-the-art imaging and computational analysis of microscopic data. He started his scientific career as a molecular biology and genetics student at Masaryk University. He completed his doctoral studies at the prestigious European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany. He then worked for five years at the University of California, Berkeley, in the group of the well-known American geneticist Gerald M. Rubin. He is the recipient of two prestigious European Research Council (ERC) grants and has been a member of EMBO since 2016. He has co-authored more than a hundred scientific publications that have been cited more than 56,000 times, making him one of the most cited scientists of Czech origin. From 1 February 2021, he became the Director of the CEITEC consortium in Brno. His extensive experience from prestigious research institutes in Germany and the United States of America, combined with his knowledge of the Czech academic environment, and his experience in interdisciplinary approaches at the interface between biology, physics, and computer science, contribute significantly to the gradual realisation of the CEITEC consortium's ambition to become a significant player in the field of science at least in the European research area.
ERC Grantee, Palacký University Olomouc
Michal Otyepka studied physical chemistry at Palacký University in Olomouc. Between 2008 and 2020, he headed the Department of Physical Chemistry. He now leads the Regional Center of Advanced Technologies and Materials at the Czech Advanced Technology and Research Institute (CATRIN-RCPTM) and also works in the IT4Innovations national supercomputing center at VŠB-TUO. He is dedicated to the study of the structure and properties of nanomaterials and biomacromolecules. Among other things, he was behind the discovery of the thinnest insulator in the world - fluorographene and participated in the development of the first non-metal magnet. In 2014, he received a Neuron Impuls grant from the Neuron Foundation, in 2015 a grant from the European Research Council (ERC), and in 2020, as the first Czech scientist ever, an ERC Proof of Concept grant. As part of the EIC Transition project, which he has coordinated since 2022, he focuses on the commercial application of nitrogen-doped graphene in supercapacitors.
ERC Grantee, Masaryk Institute and Archive of the CAS
Michal is a senior researcher at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He received his PhD in modern history from the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Charles University in Prague and has held several fellowships and research grants. Intellectually and scientifically, he was informed by the research on multiethnic society in Bohemian Lands and East-Central Europe and critical approach to modern nation states. His PhD thesis (published in Czech in 2007 and in German in 2011) provided a new history of the late 19th century Czech antisemitism. Together with Miloslav Szabó, he co-authored a monograph examining Czech and Slovak antisemitism around 1918, during the First World War and in the process of construction of the Czechoslovak nation state. Michal is active in the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure which aims to improve access to Holocaust-related collections.
Michal’s interest in refugee history started from his research on Czechoslovak reactions to people fleeing Nazi Germany. Together with Kateřina Čapková, he published the Unsichere Zuflucht (2012, in Czech as Nejisté útočiště, 2008), the history of the Czechoslovak refugee policies in the 1930s. The book challenged established narratives which idealised the Czechoslovak approach and largely focused on political and cultural elites rather than the marginalised poor, less connected and/or Jewish refugees. He is the Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator project “Unlikely refuge? Refugees and citizens in East-Central Europe in the 20th century which investigates the continuities and ruptures in refugee reception in East-Central Europe over the 20th century and aims to make refugees at home in the histories of the region.
Michal FranklERC Grantee, Biology Centre CAS
Katerina Sam obtained Master degrees in Biology of ecosystems and in Zoology at University of South Bohemia in Ceske Budejovice in Czech Republic. After that, she continued at the same institution for the Ph.D. in Ornithology, which she obtained in 2013. After that, she was based shortly at University of Copenhagen in Denmark, University of Brisbane and Queensland University in Brisbane in Australia. She returned to Czech Republic in 2017, to establish the Laboratory of Multitrophic Interactions at the Entomology Institute of Biology Centre of Czech Academy of Sciences. The year after that, she received ERC Starting grant nicknamed BABE, which stands for Bird, Ant and Bat Exclosure experiment, and which focuses on the hypothesis Why is the world green. In total, she (co)-authored 75 publications, 61 of them in peer-review journals. Her current H index is 22, and her work was cited 2159 times. Her laboratory has currently 9 PhD students, 2 postdoctoral researchers and 5 technicians. For her research work, she received Martina Roeslova award in 2017, Wichterle award in 2018 and Antzak award in 2019. Recently, in 2022 , Katerina became Head of the Department of Ecology at the Entomology Institute of Czech Academy of Sciences.
During her current work, Katerina Sam focuses on the interactions between plants, their herbivores and trophic cascades. She investigates how the trophic leaves communicate with each other, and how they affect each other. Specifically, she is focused on the effect of predation on the fitness of plants in various habitats and forest strata, which were previously inaccessible to researchers. She conducts her manipulative experiments across large scales, in an experiment spanning from Hokkaido in Japan to Sydney in southern Australia. She often manages large teams, and she also supervises ornithological surveys at large scales across Papua New Guinea as a part of Food and Agriculture Organization.
Kateřina SamFellow (European Fellowship), De Montfort University
Dr Petra Trnkova is Research Fellow at the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague with expertise in 19th-century photography and history of photomechanical-printing practices and networks. In 2019–2020, she was an MSCA fellow (EU, Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme) at the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, where she investigated history of photomechanical printing in the UK, France and the Habsburg monarchy in the mid-19th century. She co-/authored and edited several books, including ‘Oudadate Pix: Revealing a Photographic Archive’ (2010) and ‘Buquoys’ Rožmberk. Visual Culture of an Aristocratic Seat in the Period of Romantic Historicism’ (2013). Her recent writings include ‘Electrifying Daguerreotypes: On Correlations between Electricity and Photography around 1840’ (History of Photography, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2022.2062907) and ‘Metternich’s collection of Talbot’s photographs: A lost album as a virtually material being’ (Journal of the History of Collections, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhac023). Currently, she is completing a monograph on the arrival and early development of photography on paper in Central Europe.
SoMoPro (COFUND) Fellow, CEITEC
Since 2017, Hélène Robert Boisivon, Ph.D., is the group leader of the “Hormonal crosstalk in Plant Development” research team, in the Mendel Centre for Plant Genomics and Proteomics, headed by Prof. Dr. Jiří Fajkus, at CEITEC Masaryk University, in Brno, Czech Republic.
Hélène Robert Boisivon studied biology at the University of Rouen, France, and accomplished her Master studies at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France. Her practical training marked the starting of a long relationship with seed development at Laboratory of Reproduction and Development of Plants, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Fred Berger, now at the Gregor Mendel Institute in Vienna, Austria.
In 2002, she started her Ph.D. studies at the Institute of Biology, in Leiden, The Netherlands, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Remko Offringa. She worked on the regulation of the PINOID protein kinase for the polar transport of auxin, a phytohormone involved in most development processes. She graduated in May 2008.
In September 2007, she moved to the Center for Plant Systems Biology at VIB-University of Ghent in Belgium to join the group of Prof. Dr. Jiří Friml, now at IST Vienna, Austria. She worked on unraveling how auxin production is involved in embryo development in Arabidopsis thaliana.
She moved to CEITEC Masaryk University in November 2012, as a post-doc (SoMoPro, 2014-2016), to continue her work on the regulation of auxin production in seed development. She became a Junior Group Leader in 2017 and was tenured in 2021.
Her research group is now investigating the impacts of warm temperatures on seed development and seed production in the research model Arabidopsis thaliana and the crop model Brassica napus (oilseed rape). The team has expertise in various methodologies in molecular biology, microscopy, plant genetics, development, embryogenesis, reproduction, and hormones. The team members come from various countries: Czech Republic, Poland, Spain, India, Iran, Tunisia and France.
Hélène Robert-BoisivonMERIT (COFUND), Central Bohemian Innovation Center
Martina Vycudilíková received her master degree in Social Sciences and French language and linguistics at Charles University Prague. She worked as a language teacher, translator and a project manager of several international projects before she joined the team of the Central Bohemian Innovation Centre as the regional RIS3 team member. Since 2015, her agenda included several activities involving close cooperation with regional research organisations and scientists: mapping of research organisations needs and challenges and designing relevant service and strategic programmes to overcome those challenges, regional Welcome Office for foreign researchers, organising networking events of diverse formats such as meetups, hackathons and speed dating involving both scientists and business representatives, organising conferences and workshops on technology transfer and other topics related to research organisations. Currently, she is the Programme Manager of MERIT – the Central Bohemia Mobility Programme for Excellence in Research, Innovation and Technology, co-funded by Horizon Europe, MSCA-COFUND-2021, implemented from 2023 to 2027.
SoMoPro (COFUND) Fellow, CEITEC
Since 2017, Hélène Robert Boisivon, Ph.D., is the group leader of the “Hormonal crosstalk in Plant Development” research team, in the Mendel Centre for Plant Genomics and Proteomics, headed by Prof. Dr. Jiří Fajkus, at CEITEC Masaryk University, in Brno, Czech Republic.
Hélène Robert Boisivon studied biology at the University of Rouen, France, and accomplished her Master studies at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France. Her practical training marked the starting of a long relationship with seed development at Laboratory of Reproduction and Development of Plants, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Fred Berger, now at the Gregor Mendel Institute in Vienna, Austria.
In 2002, she started her Ph.D. studies at the Institute of Biology, in Leiden, The Netherlands, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Remko Offringa. She worked on the regulation of the PINOID protein kinase for the polar transport of auxin, a phytohormone involved in most development processes. She graduated in May 2008.
In September 2007, she moved to the Center for Plant Systems Biology at VIB-University of Ghent in Belgium to join the group of Prof. Dr. Jiří Friml, now at IST Vienna, Austria. She worked on unraveling how auxin production is involved in embryo development in Arabidopsis thaliana.
She moved to CEITEC Masaryk University in November 2012, as a post-doc (SoMoPro, 2014-2016), to continue her work on the regulation of auxin production in seed development. She became a Junior Group Leader in 2017 and was tenured in 2021.
Her research group is now investigating the impacts of warm temperatures on seed development and seed production in the research model Arabidopsis thaliana and the crop model Brassica napus (oilseed rape). The team has expertise in various methodologies in molecular biology, microscopy, plant genetics, development, embryogenesis, reproduction, and hormones. The team members come from various countries: Czech Republic, Poland, Spain, India, Iran, Tunisia and France.
Hélène Robert-Boisivon