8th January 2026

Thanks for visiting us, Irina!

It was a great pleasure welcoming Dr. Irina Ritsch from Scripps for a special New Year’s Seminar at Masaryk University yesterday. Amazing talk, great discussions! I am glad you managed to try out ‘svíčková’, Czech beer, and other traditional local stuff. I hope you enjoyed your stay in Brno and will come visit us again in the future. Many thanks to the Branco Weiss Fellowship for supporting both Irina’s and my research. Without the Fellowship bringing us together, this meeting would never have happened.

5th January 2026

Welcome Basti!

A big warm welcome to the first international member of the Fiala Lab—Bastian Mertes! Basti is joining us after a Ph.D. with Tanja Gaich at the University of Konstanz. He is a super-experienced synthetic chemist. In our group, he will focus on developing novel warheads for protein modification. It’s great to have you with us, Basti!

8th December 2025

MUNI Scientist Award 2025 for Tom

For his achievements in funding aquisition—bringing the Branco Weiss Fellowship to Masaryk University and obtaining the ERC Starting Grant and Experientia Start-Up Grant—Tom obtained the MUNI Scientist Award 2025. Many thanks to the Grant Agency of Masaryk University for recognizing our contributions to the scientific community at MUNI!

5th December 2025

Tom gives an invited talk at the AtPS

In the beautiful city of Vienna, Tom was awarded as the runner-up for the BACHEM-AtPS Award in Peptide Science and gave an invited talk at the Austrian Peptide Symposium about our collagen work. Many thanks to Christian Gruber and Christian Becker for the great conference!

26th November 2025

The work of the Fiala Lab introduced on Czech Radio PLUS

Our new lab keeps attracting the attention of media. On Czech Radio PLUS (Český rozhlas PLUS), our group introduced our strategies towards uncovering the origins of neurodegenerative diseases. “Today, we are trying to put out a big fire. Instead, we need to develop fire prevention measures.”—that’s how we tried to describe the main issue of Alzheimer and Parkinson disease treatment to the general public. Many thanks to Matěj and Michal for discussing their experiements with the great Mr. Hensl! Listen here or read here (only in Czech).

25th November 2025

Hynek talks about solvatochromic dyes on Science ON

In a live stream organized by Science ON, Hynek performed demonstrations of experiments with solvatochromic dyes. You can watch the video here. Science ON brings together scientists, teachers, students, and popularizers to bring scientific topics to the general public and inspire teachers to use innovative approaches in STEM education. So proud of you, Hynek. Great work!

30th October 2025

Another big grant for the Fiala Lab: GAČR Junior Star

The Fiala Lab is on a huge grant streak! Tom won the prestigeous Junior Star Grant from the Czech Grant Agency. This top government grant for junior PIs will allow us to develop self-assembling peptides as moleclar trimerizers with generous € 1’000’000 funding over five years. This award brings our current active funding to over € 4’000’000—an absolute dream for a newly established group!.

4th September 2025

ERC Starting Grant for the Fiala Lab

Tom has been awarded the prestigeous ERC Starting Grant. The European Research Council will support our PROTEOFORMER project with € 1’810’000. The generous funding will allow us to develop chemical tools to manipulate individual protein forms with high selectivity and tackle so far elusive questions in neuroscience. With our probes, we hope to shed new light on the biology of Parkinson’s disease and neuroinflammation.

12th May 2025

Tom wins the Alfred Bader Prize

Tom has been awarded the Alfred Bader Prize in Bioorganic and Bioinorganic Chemistry 2025. The award is a collaboration between the Czech Chemical Society and Bader Philanthropies, a foundation of the late Alfred Bader—a chemist and businessman, founder of Aldrich Chemicals. The prize is awarded to Czech chemists under the age of 35 and comes with prize money and an award lecture at the annual ‘Liblice—Advances in Organic, Bioorganic and Pharmaceutical Chemistry’ conference.

9th May 2025

Collagen heterotrimers that break all records!

We present the shortest stable collagen heterotrimer, the most stable collagen heterotrimer ever made, as well as the first “blunt-ended” collagen heterotrimer. All of this in our paper ‘Hyperstable, Minimal-Length, and Blunt-Ended Collagen Heterotrimers’, now out in Angewandte Chemie.

13th February 2025

New perspective article on targetable voltage sensors

Check out our perspective article ‘Seeing the Spikes: The Future of Targetable Synthetic Voltage Sensors’, now out in ACS Chemical Neuroscience! In the paper, we summarize progress in developing targetable voltage-sensitive dyes (VSDs), discuss areas where these synthetic sensors are or could become relevant, and outline hurdles that need to be overcome to promote the routine use of targetable VSDs in neuroscience research.