The not so short story about writing a grant proposal
last update 2021-03-27
I have recently lost a collaborator with which we were preparing a grant proposal. He changed his mind and went with another more senior/competitive/secured partner. Because there was not a place for me in their proposal, I decided to apply on my own. Unfortunately, I must start from scratch because the previous topic does not make sense without the collaboration. So I take this opportunity to share my thoughts about the grant application, and write a cookbook which may be useful especially for those sailing in the deep waters of the Czech academic environment. The story might not be short (Latex users know).
The deadline is April 8. I'm starting now.
Three grants of the Internal Grant Agency approved
published 2021-03-01
UCT Prague offers one-year funding through its Internal Grant Agency. We are pleased to announced that from our lab three grants, one research and two teaching, were approved. The research grant goes to Felipe, who will study peptide behavior in carbon nanotube. Michal is a PI and co-PI of two teaching grants, which aim at improving physical chemistry courses via an online search tool. Stay tuned for the updates.
Supervision workshop in Brno
published 2020-10-10
Michal co-organized a workshop for PhD supervisors at Masaryk University Brno (MUNI). It was a second round of workshops organized by Czexpats in Science and the Rector's office for early career researchers and group leaders. Apart from Michal, who gave a talk about supervisor-student relationship, three speakers shared their experience: Monika Čechová from Penn State, USA, Tomáš Kubař from Karsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, and Olga Löblová from Cambridge University, UK. Michal's slides are available here (in Czech).
První víkend s Linuxem
The first weekend with Linux
last update 2020-08-31
Undergraduate students often come to me with their interest in computational chemistry and/or biomolecular dynamics. It is a fascinating research area indeed, but I somewhat feel that the beginning is either hard or slow. So far, I haven't found an effective way to start investigating molecules without a decent knowledge of bash, python, and some specific computational chemistry program. I know there are many tutorials with toy models with known output to reproduce, etc., but I find such work less attractive than pure exploration. Hence I wrote this Linux intro suited specifically for what we do in my group at UCT. To decrease the activation barrier even more, it's in Czech. I hope you'll find English resources, should your Czech be poorer than bash.
Aneta and Ondra defended their theses
published 2020-07-10
Two members of our team have defended their theses and successfully finished bachelor studies. They've became the first students obtaining a degree under Michal's supervision. Ondra is leaving to study proteins experimentally at the Department of microbiology at UCT. Aneta is leaving as well, but we hope it will be just temporarilly. She plans to discover the student's life in Portugal during an Erasmus stay. Best wishes to both of them.
Polyhalogenated phenothiazines to fight tuberculosis
published 2020-06-30
A press release about our recent paper.
The Mycobacterium tuberculosis causes over a million deaths annually. Especially in third-world countries, it is still a severe problem, which may even worsen due to antibiotic resistance. An international team of researchers, together with Dr. Michal H. Kolář from UCT Prague, has now developed new compounds to fight the bacterium, which had cost George Orwell or Jane Austen their lives.
Felipe supported a course of bioinformatics
published 2020-06-02
In the second week of May, Felipe gave a talk on a course at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) entitled “Bioinformatics: a universe of applications”. He joined the course via a video call, shared his personal experience with structural bioinformatics, and presented his previous and current research works. The idea was to make bachelor students more comfortable with bioinformatics, and promote the field among new students. The course was organized by the Academic Center of Biotechnology from UFRGS for the IX academic week of the biotechnology course.
Workshop about supervision
published 2020-03-04
Last week Michal visited Masaryk university (MUNI) in Brno, Czech Republic, to join a workshop for group leaders about student supervision with his talk entitled "Fantastic supervisors and where to find them". He shared his personal experience augmented by a few thoughts about topics related to research groups, such as academic inbreeding or science efficiency. The presentation slides in Czech are available online. The workshop was the first event organized by MUNI in cooperation with Czexpats in Science, a platform which connects Czech scientists living abroad.
Grand Prix of Czech science: Analysis of the research grants of the Czech Science Foundation for 2020
published 2020-03-03
Czech Science Foundation (aka GAČR) is the main source of research grants for many Czech scientists at universities or elsewhere. Through Czexpats in Science – a platform that connects Czech scientists working abroad – we asked GAČR for data about the project proposals with the starting date in 2020. Although our proposal was "partially rejected", we still received a dataset to analyze. We studied the research grant schemes and analyzed the behavior of Czech institutes in the competitions. The input data, as well as the analysis scripts in python and R, are available on github.com. Here we present the full blog post in Czech written by Michal H. Kolář and Radim Hladík.
Students intake
published 2020-02-13
Three new undergraduate students want to learn some of Python and Gromacs, and will study how biomolecules move. Welcome Hugo, Jan and Petr.