Leadership
Matouš Glanc
Director
Matouš makes sure that everything in Czexpats in Science runs as it should, conceptually, content-wise and operationally. Originally a molecular biologist: before becoming the director of Czexpats in Science, he studied the mechanisms of plant cell polarization and their influence on plant growth and development. He has spent almost his entire research career abroad: he did his PhD in Prof. Jiri Friml’s lab at ISTA in Austria, followed by four years as an EMBO and MSCA research fellow at VIB Ghent in Belgium.
Markéta Icha Kubánková
Cofounder, Steering board member
Markéta co-founded Czexpats in Science and, as part of the Steering Board, she ensures that the organisation best serves the community of Czech scientists around the world. In her lifetime, she has spent over 20 years abroad. After studying biomedical engineering at CTU in Prague, she completed her PhD and a short postdoc at Imperial College London. In 2018 she moved to Germany to the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen, where she works on the mechanical properties of cells and developing new methods for diagnostics from a single drop of blood or from biopsies.
Anna Stejskalová
Cofounder, Steering Board member
Anna cofounded Czexpats in Science and primarily oversees professional development within the Steering Board. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wyss Institute at Harvard Medical School in the USA, where she studies the relationship between bacterial microbiota composition and risk of preterm birth using the organ-on-a-chip technique. Previously, she was a WiRe fellow at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, where she studied endometriosis. She received her PhD in bioengineering from Imperial College London.
Olga Löblová
Steering board member
Within Czexpats in Science, Olga focuses on its advocacy policy and she represents the voice of scientists and scholars in the social sciences and humanities. She is also involved in research about Czech scientists abroad. Olga received her Ph.D. from the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest in political science, specialising in public policy. She is now a Wellcome Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology of the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on health policy, especially on issues arund financing health technology. After finishing high school (A-Levels) in Prague, she studied in France, Germany, Poland, Hungary and the Netherlands. She collaborates with the Geographic Migration Centre at the Faculty of Science, Charles University.
Office
Dagmar Kočandrlová
Community manager
Dáša focuses on community engagement, handling both external and internal communications. She makes sure crucial information always reaches the right people. She prepares website content and, in collaboration with the communications team, develops social media content. She is also involved in event production, overseeing their smooth execution. She studied Information Systems and Technology at the University of Economics in Prague, with a minor specialisation in Marketing. After spending years in e-commerce, she has shifted her focus and appreciates the opportunity to contribute to the Czexpats mission.
Eva Höschlová
PRODUCTION manager
Eva ensures smooth coordination of events and administration of the back-office. Her professional background bridges the fields of art, media, and operations management. She studied photography at the UMPRUM. Previously, she managed the operations of Mamacoffee cafés in Prague, where she developed her skills in team leadership and multitasking. In her current role, she focuses on creating a reliable and well-organized foundation that enables the Czexpats in Science team to fully concentrate on their scientific and communication work.
Events
Jonáš Fuksa
After joining Czexpats in 2022, Jonáš has been a part of the event organisation team as the main volunteer organiser of the yearly Christmas conference in 2024 and 2025. He has also co-organised a local meeting of Czech scientists in Germany, and contributed to a podcast in collaboration with Diana Biotech. Jonáš is a PhD candidate at the Free University of Berlin, where he works on quantum technologies, specifically benchmarking of quantum processors, and the theory of machine learning with tensor networks. He moved to Berlin after studying Natural Sciences and Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.
Marta Šiborová
Local meet-up Coordinator
Marta is in charge of coordinating and supporting the organization of local meetings abroad. Her experience helps local czexpats to design the overall concept of events, establish first contacts and successfully reach out to local czexpats. She joined Czexpats after a successful Czexpats meeting in The Hague. She studied Biochemistry at Masaryk University and received her PhD in Structural Biology from CEITEC. Since 2022 she has been living in the Netherlands, where she is a postdoc at Utrecht University. She studies the structure of bacterial and human viruses, their interactions with the host or the host immune system.
Eliška Koňaříková
Eliška makes sure that the various events organised by Czexpats in Science run smoothly. She has a Master’s degree in Cellular Physiology from the Faculty of Science of Charles University and a Master’s degree in Management and Economics from the Czech University of Life Sciences. Her scientific niche is molecular biology, and is now alternating between being a postdoc at the Institute of Physiology CAS and being on parental leave. Her abroad experience started during an Erasmus stay in Frankfurt am Main, followed by a PhD at the Technical University of Munich.
Julie Kovářová
Most of all, Julie enjoys organising events where czexpats and repats can meet in person, share their experiences and help to improve the environment in Czech science. Professionally, she is a postdoc at the Biology Centre of the CAS in České Budějovice, where she studies the metabolism of unicellular parasites responsible for tropical diseases, i.e. what and how these parasites eat from us. Julie completed her PhD at the University of Glasgow, and because she loved her time in Scotland, she stayed on for another three years as a postdoc at the University of Dundee.
Barbora Fürychová
Barbora joined Czexpats in 2024 after meeting the team abroad and wanting to support their mission. Within Czexpats, she helps organize volunteers during events. She is currently pursuing studies in Applied Oceanography at the University of Malta and Environmental Sciences at Charles University in Prague. Her main research interest lies in ecotoxicology, particularly in the study of microplastics and their impact on marine environments. She has participated in scientific research on microplastic pollution, working on projects in Belgium and on Réunion Island, where she studied contamination in deep-sea ecosystems. At the University of Malta, she focuses on the use of AI and drone technology for non-invasive monitoring of coastal wildlife, aiming to support conservation efforts through innovative and sustainable approaches.
Karolína Korvasová
Karolína coordinates the content preparation of the PI forum. She studied mathematics with a focus on mathematical biology at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University and Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Since her doctoral studies at the Jülich Research Center in Germany, she has been working in neuroscience and is currently leading a neuroscience research group at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University, supported by the Primus program. She is passionate about interdisciplinary communication and is interested in the transfer of knowledge from science to medicine.
Valeriia Belova
Tomáš Marťák
Tomáš is involved in the Advocacy branch of Czexpats, as well as assisting with event organisation. After completing his BSc Biochemistry at the University of Glasgow, he enjoyed the Life Sciences degrees there enough to also complete an MRes in Biomedical Sciences. Currently, Tomáš works as a molecular biologist and bioinformatician at the Prague-based biological startup Terasom. Outside of his activities in Czexpats, he is also an active mentor and a member of the outreach committee of the Yoda Mentorship Programme.
Advocacy
Kristýna Bubeníková
Kristýna has been taking care of production matters at Czexpats for a long time and has now moved on to advocacy work. She is researching the evolution and host specialization of hymenopteran parasitoids in the Department of Zoology at the Faculty of Science CU. As part of her studies, she has completed internships lasting a total of six months in Germany, specifically at the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change (LIB), Museum Koenig Bonn and the Stuttgart State Museum of Natural History. She is currently a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Iowa.
Jakub Tomek
In 2024, Jakub became a member of Czexpats in Science’s advocacy team, wanting to share his experience with positive aspects of academic systems abroad. He works as a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellow at the University of Oxford, where he utilizes the combination of computational modelling and wet lab experiments to study mechanisms of cardiac arrhythmia, one of the leading causes of mortality worldwide. Before this role, he held positions as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Davis, and Oxford University, where he also completed his PhD.
Olga Löblová
Steering board member
Within Czexpats in Science, Olga focuses on its advocacy policy and she represents the voice of scientists and scholars in the social sciences and humanities. She is also involved in research about Czech scientists abroad. Olga received her Ph.D. from the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest in political science, specialising in public policy. She is now a Wellcome Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology of the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on health policy, especially on issues arund financing health technology. After finishing high school (A-Levels) in Prague, she studied in France, Germany, Poland, Hungary and the Netherlands. She collaborates with the Geographic Migration Centre at the Faculty of Science, Charles University.
Vlaďka Petráková
cofounder
Vlaďka cofounded Czexpats in Science and is now the Chair of the Steering Board. She is also a group leader at the Heyrovský Institute of Physical Chemistry of the CAS. Previously, she was a Humboldt Fellow at the Free University of Berlin in the field of solid state physics and biochemistry. She is interested in the interaction of fluorophores and plasmonic nanoparticles for applications in superresolution microscopy. She holds a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the Institute of Physics of the CAS and the Czech Technical University in Prague. She is also involved in promoting equal opportunities in science.
Jan Mašek
Janek is in charge of the agenda related to the advocacy effort Czexpats in Science, which seeks to increase transparency of science in the Czech Republic. If you are interested in these topics, please do not hesitate to contact him. He is a developmental biologist and group leader at Charles University focusing on intercellular communication. After his undergraduate studies at Masaryk University in Brno and Ph.D. at Charles University in the laboratory of Zbyněk Kozmik at IMG CAS, he spent four years as a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Emma Andersson at Karolinska Institute in Sweden, focusing on Notch signalling in different contexts of mammalian development and disease.
Petra Trnková
Petra joined Czexpats in Science in 2024 and became part of advocacy team. She promotes open and transparent selection processes for university positions. She is also a group leader at Czech Technical University in Prague focusing on medical physics in radiation oncology. She holds a PhD from Medical University of Vienna. Afterwards, she worked as PostDoc at Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, Harvard Medical School in USA, Holland PTC in the Netherlands and at Medical University in Vienna in Austria.
Pavlína Hubková
Pavlína is part of an advocacy team dedicated to defending the interests of Czech science and Czech scientists. At Czexpats in Science, she advocates for the perspective of scholars in the social sciences and humanities. She tirelessly argues that law – her area of expertise – is also a science, even if some (especially lawyers) might disagree. After studying law and international relations in Prague, she gained academic experience in Belgium, Italy, and Luxembourg. She is currently conducting research and teaching EU law at Maastricht University.
Martina Plisová
Markéta Doležalová
Markéta is involved in research about who Czech scientists abroad are, what their needs are, whether they are interested in collaborating with their Czech colleagues or returning to the Czech Republic and how Czexpats in Science could support them. Markéta has been working in the UK for a long time. She has a PhD from the University of Manchester and currently works at the Centre for Employment Relations, Innovation and Change at the University of Leeds. She also collaborates with the Geographic Migration Centre at the Faculty of Science at Charles University.
Communication
Soňa Krajčovičová
Communication coordinator
Soňa works at Czexpats as a social media content creator, especially on Twitter (X) and Linkedin. She joined Czexpats in October 2023, after a successful Czexpats meeting in London. She completed her undergraduate studies at Masaryk University in Brno and her PhD at Palacký University in Olomouc. During her PhD she was on an internship in Göttingen, Germany, for which she received a DAAD scholarship. Since 2021, she has been living in the UK, where she is a postdoc at the University of Cambridge, thanks to a scholarship from the Experientia Foundation and the Czech Science Foundation. She is a synthetic organic chemist with a focus on chemical biology and at Cambridge she is mainly involved in the synthesis of peptides and ADCs.
Ondřej Černotík
Webmaster
Within Czexpats, Ondřej makes sure that all digital platforms work as they should. His most visible role is as webmaster, but he is also responsible for a number of internal tools. He is a researcher at Palacký University in Olomouc, where he leads a young team dedicated to theoretical quantum optics and quantum technologies. His international experience is from Germany, where he spent almost five and a half years – first as a PhD student at the University of Hannover, then as a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute in Erlangen.
Martina Chrudinová
web administration
Martina joined the Czexpats team after the 2022 Christmas Conference and has been helping to prepare and update web contents. Currently, she is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the CAS, where she is researching insulin, insulin-like growth factors, and their synthetic analogues. In the past, during her first postdoc, she spent 3 and a half years at Boston College in the USA, where she also investigated insulin and similar molecules, but in this case those whose natural occurrence has been detected in some viruses.
Blanka Collis
Blog editor
Blanka proofreads blog posts and actively seeks out new blog authors. She holds an MSc in Natural Sciences (Biochemistry) from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in Enzymology from the University of Sheffield. She remained in the UK for her first postdoc (in DNA repair) at the University of Oxford, from where she and her family moved “abroad” to Prague. At the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry CAS she first worked as a postdoc in membrane protein research, from 2021 she supported researchers with the preparation of project proposals within IOCB’s project office, and since 2024 she is based in the research support group, overlooking the equal opportunities agenda and looking after career development of early career researchers. She has also spent her school years in Germany.
Anna Altová
Anna is in charge of organising workshops in the Sharing Czexpats series, which aim to introduce early career researchers to academic culture abroad. She is currently pursuing her PhD at the Department of Demography and Geodemography at the Faculty of Science of Charles University. She focuses on participation in cancer screening by Czech women and the barriers that prevent them from participating in preventive care. In addition to short-term research stays, she has so far spent a year abroad as part of the international European Doctoral School of Demography programme, specifically at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock and at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
Iva Poulíčková
Iva takes care of our sponsors and partners and is becoming the new “Brno liaison” for our organization. With her previous experience, she is well-oriented in the scientific and business environment of the South Moravian Region. In addition to supporting Czech scientists abroad, she also focuses on the integration of foreign expats in Brno. She is part of the smaller segment of the team dedicated to the humanities, and her passion lies in languages. She is fluent in English and French and has a good command of Spanish. She can also communicate in Italian and Russian. Iva is now combining her enthusiasm for linguistics and interculturality with an interest in psychology and neuroscience, and she is preparing for a doctoral program with a research project aimed at connecting foreign languages with mental health care. Iva studied in France and has lived and worked in Morocco and Spain.
Pavla Hubálková
Within Czexpats in Science, Pavla handles science communication to the czexpats community and to the general public. Previously she was also involved in event organisation. She works as a science journalist at Charles University and writes about science for other media. She also teaches science communicators and helps scientists to communicate their results. Originally planning to be a researcher herself, she studied Clinical Biochemistry at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague and completed her Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the Third Medical Faculty of Charles University. She spent one summer at EMBL Heidelberg and, thanks to a Fulbright scholarship, also spent a year at Northwestern University in Chicago. It was here that she realised that she wanted to pursue science communication in the future.
Tomáš Jelínek
Vojtěch Šebek
Petra Luláková
Petra looks after the communication with Ukrainian researchers arriving in Czechia as well as those who have stayed in Ukraine. With the support of the whole Czexpats team, she looks for ways to help them. She studied Physical Geography at the Faculty of Science at Charles University and Soil Evaluation at the Czech University of Life Sciences and is currently pursuing a PhD in Soil Ecology at the Faculty of Science at the University of South Bohemia. During her studies she spent six months at Reykjavík University (Iceland) and at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (Switzerland).
Jaroslav Icha
Jára no longer works directly in science, but for the last few years he has been working for biotech companies in positions close to research. He shares this experience with our organization, where he looks after some aspects of cooperation with the private sector and the agenda of non-academic careers. Between 2018 and 2022, he communicated for Czexpats in Science via its social media channels. He spent seven years in research abroad, focusing on cell biology, first as a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute in Dresden (for five years) and then as an EMBO fellow at the University of Turku in Finland (for two years).
Czexpats in Science award
Hana Huszár
Hana started to participate in Czexpats activities in 2022, when she helped to find jobs for Ukrainian scientists in the Czech Republic. Since 2024 she has been part of Czexpats on a long-term basis and is in charge of coordinating the Czexpats in Science Award. Among other things, she also contributes to the organization of local meetings in Austria. She studied plant molecular biology at the Faculty of Science, Charles University in Prague. She received her PhD at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, where she studied the regulation of vesicle transport in the plant cell and its influence on root development. After her Ph.D. she moved from academia to the biotechnology industry and works in the field of advanced tissue culture in Graz, Austria.
Markéta Icha Kubánková
Cofounder, Steering board member
Markéta co-founded Czexpats in Science and, as part of the Steering Board, she ensures that the organisation best serves the community of Czech scientists around the world. In her lifetime, she has spent over 20 years abroad. After studying biomedical engineering at CTU in Prague, she completed her PhD and a short postdoc at Imperial College London. In 2018 she moved to Germany to the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen, where she works on the mechanical properties of cells and developing new methods for diagnostics from a single drop of blood or from biopsies.
Michal H. Kolář
Michal coordinates informal education of young scientists through workshops and seminars, where czexpats and those who have already returned to the Czech Republic from abroad share their experiences. Michal graduated from the Faculty of Science at Charles University and after four years of postdoctoral fellowships in Germany, he returned to the Czech Republic where he started and currently leads a research group at VŠCHT Prague. Using simulations and theoretical models he studies the dynamics of biomolecules and their complexes.
Radka Šustrová
Radka is a historian and represents the voice of social sciences and humanities in Czexpats. She is an assistant professor at the Institute of Economic and Social History at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. She specialises in 20th century history, specifically dictatorial regimes, the welfare state, gender, social movements, nationalism and the history of identities in Central Europe. Radka studied history and political science in Prague, but much of her research was and still is intertwined with her research stays in Germany and Austria. She drew significant inspiration from her time as a Newton International Fellow at the University of Cambridge from 2020-2022. From September 2023, she will continue her research as an MSCA fellow at the University of Vienna, where she will work on social justice in Czechoslovakia and Austria between 1938 and 1989.
Alumni
Eva Doležalová
Collaboration – media outputs
Hana Hušková
Events organisation
Ivana Kulhánová
Education workshops
Adam Pruška
Coordinator of local meet-ups abroad
Ivana Suchánková
Advocacy
Alžběta Türková
Coordinator – sweden
Jan Valečka
collaboration – technical support
