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.
Pavla Hubálková
Communications coordinator
Within Czexpats in Science, Pavla handles 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.
Michal H. Kolář
Professional development coordinator
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.
Eliška Koňaříková
Events coordinator
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.
Jan Mašek
Advocacy coordinator
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.
Steering board
Vlaďka Petráková
Chair of the Steering Board, 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.
Markéta Icha Kubánková
Vice-chair of the Steering board for community, cofounder
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.
Olga Löblová
Vice-chair of the Steering board for advocacy, social sciences and humanities
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.
Anna Stejskalová
Steering Board member for professional development, cofounder
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.
Team members
Anna Altová
Sharing czexpats workshops, communication
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.
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 and since 2021 she has been supporting researchers with the preparation of project proposals within IOCB’s project office. She has also spent her her school years in Germany.
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.
Markéta Doležalová
Research
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.
Hana Hušková
Events organisation
Within Czexpats in Science, Hanka is part of the events team. In the past, she was involved in other projects and activities, as well as being the coordinator of administrative organisation of CiS. During her PhD studies she worked at the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France, where she studied mutational signatures and genes involved in cancer. She then moved to Marseille, southern France, where she researched proteins involved in DNA repair. After returning to Czechia during her parental break, she was employed by Czexpats and is now working out her next career move.
Jaroslav Icha
Cooperation with the private sector
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).
Julie Kovářová
Advocacy, events organisation
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.
Ivana Kulhánová
Education workshops
Ivana is involved in the organization of educational workshops at Czexpats in Science. In addition, she works at the Department of Social Geography and Regional Development at the Faculty of Science, Charles University. Her research interests include demography, social epidemiology, public health, epidemiology of malignant neoplasms, social inequalities in health.
Petra Luláková
Ukraine project coordinator
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).
Adam Pruška
Coordinator of local meet-ups abroad
Adam is mainly involved in organising local meet-ups abroad. His own experience with the Swiss meet-ups helps local czexpats to establish first contacts and propose the overall concept of events. Adam has lived in Switzerland for several years already. He studied at Masaryk University, at Giessen Universität and in 2023 he received his PhD in the field of biomolecular analysis from ETH Zurich in collaboration with Waters Inc. As part of a Swiss business grant, he is working on the development of new analytical approaches in mass spectrometry and their commercialisation, bridging academia and industry. He is a member of the committee of the Czech Society for Mass Spectrometry.
Radka Šustrová
Social sciences and humanities expert
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
In 2013, she defended her PhD at the University of Chemistry and Technology Prague in cooperation with the Institute of Plasma Physics of the CAS. In 2016 she, taking her family along, went to do a postdoctoral research stay at the Frank Reidy Research Center for Bioelectrics at the Old Dominion University (Virginia, USA). Her research involved a new method for cell electroporation using a plasma jet, her hypothesis being tested both on cells and on animals. Now she is back in the Czech Republic.
Alžběta Türková
Coordinator – sweden
Postdoctoral fellow at Uppsala University, Sweden, where she programs computer simulations of membrane fusion between viruses and host cells. From 2017-2020 she worked in Vienna during her PhD studies. She also contributed to the development of the Complex Portal database as an intern at EMBL-EBI in Hinxton, UK.
Jan Valečka
collaboration – technical support
His degree in immunology is from the Faculty of Natural Sciences of the Charles University (Prague) and his research during this time involved studying early activation of T-lymphocytes at the Institute of Molecular Genetics of the CAS. This was followed by a brief stint at the Department of Pathophysiology of the First Medical Faculty and he is now finishing his PhD at the Centre d’Immunologie de Marseille-Luminy. As part of the Labex Inform programme, he is researching the regulation of autophagy in immune cells. He likes curling and encryption games.
