RNDr. Zdeněk Havlas, DrSc.

Vice President and member of the Academy Council Presidium

  • Responsible for the II. Research Area – Life and Chemical Sciences.
  • Coordination of BIOCEV centre – CAS relations.
  • Coordination in the area of knowledge and technology transfer, cooperation with the industry and intellectual property rights use for the II. Research Area.
  • Sustainable development and environmental care at CAS institutes and in their operations.

Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the CAS

He completed his studies of physical chemistry at the Faculty of Science of the Charles University in Prague in 1969–1975. Since defending his dissertation in 1979, he has been working at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry (formerly the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, now the Czech Academy of Sciences). He completed several long-term study stays abroad – as a postdoctoral fellow at the Cornell University, Ithaca, USA (1979–1980); during 1986–1988 as a Humboldt fellow (Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany) and in 1995–2017 he was a visiting researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder (USA).

In 2002–2012 he was a Director of the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the CAS. In 2000–2004 he was a member of the Research Center for Complex Molecular Systems and Biomolecules, in 2004–2011 a member of the Centre of Biomolecules and Complex Systems and since 2006 he has been a member and a chairman of the Gilead Sciences & IOCB Research Centre. He was a member of the Scientific Council of the University of Chemistry in Prague in 2006–2015. Since 2011 he has been a member of the Government Office for Science, Research and Innovations and since 2012 a director of the Center for Development of Original Drugs (CDOD). In 2012 he was named the Honorary Chair at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the CAS. Since 2017, he has been a member of the Academy Council and Vice-President of the CAS for the area of the Life and Chemical Sciences.

In 2001 he was granted the scientific degree of DrSc. in organic chemistry, and he was also awarded the Prize of the Learned Society of the Czech Republic. He has been a member of the Learned Society of the Czech Republic since 2002, in 2014 he became the first vice-president and in 2016 the president. He was awarded several medals – Jan Hellich Medal (2007), Czech Chemical Society (2011), “De scientia et humanitate optime meritis“ (the Czech Academy of Sciences, 2013), and the Silver Medal of the Senate of the Parliament of the Czech Republic (2015). In 2020 he was awarded by lnternational Chair Professorship from National Taipei University of Technology.

In research, he deals with quantum and computational chemistry, structure and dynamics of biomolecular systems, weak intermolecular interactions, hydrogen-bonds and improper, blue-shifting hydrogen-bonds, relativistic effects in organic systems, exited states, and solar cells. He is the author or co-author of four books and 180 scientific articles (7200 citations, h-index 41). He was or is the supervisor of 21 master students and doctoral candidates.


Phone:
+420 221 403 481
  E-mail:
havlas@kav.cas.cz