Rudolf
Lukeš
Prize
The winner of the prestigious Rudolf Lukeš Prize for 2020
doc. Ing. Pavel Jelínek, Ph.D.
whose work involves investigating the chemical properties of molecular structures on solid surfaces.
doc. Ing. Pavel Jelínek, Ph.D.
is a head of the Nanosurf Lab group and the Surfaces and Molecular Structures Department at the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences
Pavel Jelínek earned his doctorate at the Czech Technical University in Prague in the field of Physical and Materials Engineering. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the group of Professor Fernando Flores at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Spain, and later worked as a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Engineering of Osaka University in Japan. He is a member of the editorial board of the international scientific journal Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter. He also works as a researcher at the Regional Centre for Advanced Technologies and Materials (RCPTM) at the Faculty of Science of Palacký University in Olomouc. For his achievements in science, he has been awarded the Otto Wichterle Award (2007), the Czech Academy of Sciences Award (2012), and the Praemium Academiae (2016).
manuscripts in journals with IF (including Science, Nature, Nature Chemistry, Nature Nanotechnology or Nature Comm.)
publications in international peer-reviewed scientific journals
citations in Google Scholar
h-index
The Rudolf Lukeš Prize is awarded for an outstanding collection of original work published in prestigious international journals in the previous five years. Now supplemented with an increased personal award of 100,000 CZK from the Experientia Foundation, the prize was formally presented to Dr Jelínek on 5 November 2020.
Why was the prize awarded to Pavel Jelínek?
“The international panel of experts were captivated by the scanning microscopy techniques being developed by Dr Jelínek, which have tremendous potential for application in organic chemistry,” said Jan Hlaváč, Chair of the Expert Group of Organic, Bioorganic and Pharmaceutical Chemistry of the Czech Chemical Society..
What does Pavel Jelínek say about the award?
“I personally view the Rudolf Lukeš Prize as a wonderful surprise, and most of all as confirmation that our research transcends the field of solid-state physics,” explains Jelínek, who is head of the Nanosurf Lab group and the Surfaces and Molecular Structures Department at the Institute of Physics.
Where does the prize-winning scientist see the benefits of his work for organic chemistry?
Primarily in the development of scanning microscopy, which now allows the imaging of the chemical structure of planar molecules on solid surfaces with the unprecedented spatial resolution. According to Jelínek, chemistry on solid surfaces also enables to synthetize compounds that cannot be prepared in solution by traditional methods. “It is also possible to prepare individual polymers and work with them without having to deal with the problem of their solubility,” Jelínek explains. “This makes it possible for us not only to study the chemical reactions at the level of individual molecules, but also to investigate their properties.”