Vladimír Sklenář#

Obituary, CEITEC
Obituary, Masaryk University (in Czech)

Biography#

Professor Sklenář is Chair of the Executive Committee of the Czech Infrastructure for Integrative Structural Biology (CIISB), the Instruct-CZ research center of the European Research Infrastructure Instruct-ERIC. He is a member of the Learned Society of the Czech Republic (since 2002) and has won a number of awards, including the Czech Republic Learned Society Award for major contributions and discovery work in the area of the development of NMR methods for the study of the structure and dynamics of biopolymers (2001), the Jan Marko Marci Medal of Kronland Spectroscopic Society of Jan Marko Marci (2011), the Vladimir Hanuš and Petr Sedmera Award of the Spectroscopic Society of Jan Marko Marci (2012), the MU Rector Award for long-long-term excellence in Research in Natural Science and Medicine (2014), CEITEC MU Prize for Extraordinary Contribution to Development (2016) and Masaryk University silver medal (2018). He has participated to the iNEXT and iNEXT Discovery consortia, European Infrastructures for NMR, EM and X-rays for Translational research. This is an EC-funded Horizon 2020 network of national infrastructures aiming to facilitate EC-supported, trans-national user access to several high-end structural biology infrastructures and to expand the use of structural biology technologies towards new research communities.

Vladimír Sklenář started his carrier as a research scientist at the Institute of Scientific Instruments of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in Brno and in the laboratories of Marion Merrell Dow pharmaceutical company in Strasbourg, France. Since 1995 he is a professor at Masaryk University in Brno. He developed a large number of methods to study biomacromolecules using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). He founded the NMR Spectroscopy Laboratory at Faculty of Science in 1995 and established the Structural Biology Programme at CEITEC Masaryk University.

In 1997, he was appointed as a full professor of physical chemistry and the deputy director of the Laboratory for Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics, and in 2001 of the National Center for Biomolecule Research (NCBR) at Masaryk University. In the period 2010 - 2016, he was the Head of CEITEC's Structural Biology Programme. His research focused on the development of multidimensional multiple resonance NMR techniques and the study of spin system dynamics and their theoretical description.

To date, he is the author or co-author of 147 papers, which have been cited more than 10,000 times with the h-index=42 according to Web of Science. Google scholar indicates more than 12 000 citations and h-index=46. His most cited paper (more than 3400 citations) describes a methodology for studying biomolecules in an aqueous environment using NMR and carries acronym WATERGATE (WATER suppression by GrAdient Tailored Excitation).