Organized by the Centre for Energy and Environmental Technologies (CEET) at VSB-Technical University of Ostrava in partnership with the Czech Advanced Technology and Engineering Network (CATEN), the event is held under the patronage of the Materials and Environmental Laboratory (MEL) of the Nanotechnology Centre. It is further supported by the European projects San4Fuel and MERGE, both coordinated by MEL researchers.
“The conference will mainly focus on the development of advanced materials for sustainable applications in energy, medicine, and chemistry,” said Radek Zboril, head of MEL and chief expert supervisor of the event, who will address this topic in his plenary lecture.
The keynote address will be delivered by Professor Klaus Müllen, ranked among the world’s ten most cited chemists (h-index 208), who is set to join the CEET team at VSB-TUO in September 2025. “On this occasion, he will be awarded an honorary professorship by Emeritus Rector Vaclav Snasel and present an opening lecture titled Carbon Nanostructures by Design. Professor Müllen previously served for over two decades as director of the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, Germany, was president of the German Chemical Society, and is a member of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences,” added Zboril, highlighting the importance of this new member of the MEL team.
In addition to Professor Müllen, the conference will feature several leading researchers, among them are Akimitsu Narita from Okinawa, Japan, author of more than 20 publications in journals from the Nature family; Hai Wang from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who specializes in the electronic properties of organic materials; Guanbo Chen, affiliated with universities in Shanghai and Dresden, who will present technologies for the sustainable production and utilization of hydrogen; and Rauf Razzaq from the Leibniz Institute for Catalysis (LIKAT), co-author of several papers in Science, who will also focus on renewable energy sources.
VSB-TUO will be represented by, for example, Michal Otyepka, a three-time recipient of grants from the European Research Council (ERC); Martin Pumera, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Applied Materials Today; and Professor Vaclav Snasel, who will focus on the use of computational technologies in materials research. Several researchers from MEL/CEET will also present their work at the conference. These include Indrajit Ghosh, one of the founders of photoredox catalysis, whose groundbreaking research has been published in Nature and Science; and Yazhou Zhou, one of the main organizers of the conference, who will highlight new opportunities in single-atom engineering for chemical catalysis.
The program will also include a visit to the new MEL laboratories, established with the support of the Refresh project and equipped with cutting-edge microscopic, spectroscopic, and deposition technologies enabling the development and analysis of materials at the single-atom level. In addition, the conference will offer a tour of the national supercomputing center IT4Innovations, including a presentation of its quantum computer and research activities based on high-performance computing.
The detailed conference program is available here.