Our Mentors

This page is dedicated to mentors who are closely connected with our laboratory. In their memory, three prestigious prizes are awarded every year in the Czech Republic.

Vladimír Hanuš

Vladimír Hanuš (1923-2009) obtained his PhD in polarography. Early in his studies, his mentors Professors Brdička and Heyrovský, gave him and three other students (V. Čermák, Č. Jech, and J. Cabicar) the task of developing a new modern method in physical chemistry, the mass spectrometric technique. In 1955, their construction of the first Czechoslovak mass spectrometer was awarded with the State Award. In 1960 V. Hanus was among the first mass spectrometrists who applied mass spectrometry to organic chemistry, namely to studies of structures and rearrangements of organic ions (e.g., Nature in 1959). He became the founder of the Czech organic mass spectrometry and developed a number of experimental improvements that enabled him to pioneer, e.g. the applications of mass spectrometry to structure elucidation of alkaloids and other natural products, which then became a classical topic. V. Hanus was an author or co-author of more than 150 papers, review articles and chapters in monographs. He also served on the editorial board of Organic Mass Spectrometry (Wiley) for its entire existence. He was awarded the Gold Heyrovský Medal of the Academy of Sciences and Ioannes Marcus Marci Medal of the Czech Spectroscopic Society.

Petr Sedmera

Petr Sedmera (1942-2010) finished his studies at the Institute of Chemical Technology in Prague in 1964 and joined the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry in Řež u Prahy. He discontinued his synthetic work in hydride chemistry in 1967, when he moved to the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry. From that time on, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy became his life destiny. He focused on structure elucidation of natural products and prof. Santavy (Olomouc) and Dr. Hanus (Prague) were his major collaborators. From political reasons he could not defend his completed PhD thesis entitled “Shielding effects of polar groups in NMR spectroscopy”. In 1971 he moved to the Institute of Microbiology in Prague and started a group focused on structure analysis of natural products and microbial secondary metabolites. He also contributed to the discovery and structure elucidation of the Czechoslovak antibiotics Mucidin, which then was clinically used as an antifungal drug. P. Sedmera defended his PhD thesis after the Velvet Revolution and from 1991 was the head of the Laboratory of molecular structure characterization. He authored or co-authored more than 250 papers and was awarded with the Hanus Medal (Czech Chemical Society).

Zdenek Herman

Prof. Zdenek Herman, DSc, a long term Senior Research Fellow at J.Heyrovský Institute of Physical Chemistry in Prague, passed away on Feb 25, 2021. His death is a great loss for the Czech and worldwide scientific community, losing an exceptionally respected scientist and scholar in the areas of molecular reaction dynamics, elementary collision processes, and their mechanisms, scattering of ions, cluster ions, ion-surface interactions, and many other topics he interrogated in a discipline he called Chemical Physics. From 1996 he had served as Professor of Physical Chemistry, Institute of Chemical Technology, Prague. As a visiting professor, he was active at many prestigious sites in the USA, Japan, UK, France, Germany, Austria (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zdenek_Herman). He was a recipient of the honorary doctorate (University of Innsbruck, Austria), Alexander von Humboldt Research Award (Germany), and Česká hlava (Czech Republic). His passing is a hard blow to the Czech scientific community and Czech society for mass spectrometry.

Miroslav Ryska

RNDr. Miroslav Ryska, CSc. is a pioneering Czech mass spectrometrist who helped establish high-resolution mass spectrometry in Czechoslovakia and trained generations of analytical chemists. After early training abroad and a postdoctoral stay at the University of Cologne, he founded and led mass-spectrometry laboratories at the Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry (Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences) and later at the Research Institute for Pharmacy and Biochemistry in Prague, extending MS from polymer chemistry to bioorganic and pharmaceutical analysis. Following the post-1989 restructuring, he co-founded the private analytical company QUINTA-ANALYTICA, translating state-of-the-art MS into drug development and clinical testing. He also shaped the Czech MS community as the long-term leader of the mass-spectrometry group within the Ioannes Marcus Marci Spectroscopic Society, an organizer of MS summer schools, and a lecturer of specialized MS courses at UCT Prague. He remains closely connected to our laboratory as one of the mentors who influenced its early scientific direction.

Photo: QUINTA-ANALYTICA / LabRulez LCMS (CC BY-SA 4.0)

David A. Stevens

David A. Stevens is Professor of Medicine (Emeritus) in Infectious Diseases at Stanford University School of Medicine and lead a long-standing fungal-disease research program at the California Institute for Medical Research (CIMR) in San Jose. His work bridges clinical practice and experimental models to understand fungal pathogenesis and host response, and to improve diagnosis and therapy—most notably in invasive aspergillosis and coccidioidomycosis. Through decades of mentorship, clinical reference-laboratory leadership, and broad collaborative research, he has helped shape modern medical mycology and trained many clinician-scientists at the interface of infectious diseases and translational microbiology. He also trained Vladimír Havlíček during his research stay at Stanford in 2022.

Photo Credit: Stanford Medicine.