Members

Researchers

Petr Kabáth

Petr is a senior researcher and a head of the Extrasolar Planet Research group. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow and as a staff astronomer at ESO Paranal Observatory for nearly 6 years. He graduated at DLR Berlin, Germany, in 2009. His field of interest is detection and characterization of exoplanetary atmospheres. He was involved in the BEST II project. Currently, he coordinates a radial velocity follow-up with Ondřejov echelle spectrograph (OES) at the Perek 2-m telescope.

Contacts:

  • email: petr.kabath @ asu.cas.cz
  • phone: +420 323 620 143
  • ORCID

Marek Skarka

Marek is a research scientist. After obtaining his PhD at Masaryk University in Brno, CZ, he spent two years at Konkoly Observatory, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, HU. His expertise are stellar pulsations, binary stars with pulsating component, and time-series analysis. Currently he works on spectroscopic follow-up observations of exoplanetary candidates.

Contacts:

  • email: marek.skarka @ asu.cas.cz
  • phone: +420 323 620 127
  • ORCID

Marie Karjalainen

Marie is a research scientist. After her studies at the Charles University in Prague, she worked as a postdoc in Thueringer Landessternwarte Tautenburg. Then she spent over ten years on la Palma in Spain working for the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes and the Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov. Her research is devoted to study extrasolar planets. Among her interests are high resolution spectroscopy, accurate stellar radial velocity measurements, detection and characterisation of extrasolar planets and stellar oscillations of red giant stars.

Contacts:

  • email: marie.karjalainen @ asu.cas.cz
  • phone: +420 323 620 164
  • ORCID

Petr Škoda

Petr is a senior researcher. He has been working at the institute over thirty years. Most of this time was connected with modern astronomical instrumentation, namely CCD detectors, telescope control systems and computers. He has been leading several projects in astroinformatics at Faculty of Information technology of Czech Technical University in Prague and is a propagator and early adopter of the Virtual observatory in Czech Republic. His main interest is CCD spectroscopy of emission line objects, machine learning and analysis of Big Data in astronomy.

Contacts:

  • email: petr.skoda @ asu.cas.cz
  • phone: +420 323 620 361
  • ORCID

PostDocs

Ján Šubjak

Ján is a postdoc researcher at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, focusing on the population of transiting brown dwarfs and exoplanets from the TESS space mission. He uses spectroscopic observations to expand their populations and studies their interior, tidal interactions, spin-orbit angles and atmospheres to understand their formation and evolution.

Contacts:

Pavol Gajdoš

Pavol is a postdoc researcher. He has been involved in exoplanet research since his studies at P. J. Šafárik University in Košice. After completing his Ph.D. studies, he worked at the university for 2 years as a researcher and participated in photometric observations with the university’s 50-cm telescope. He mainly deals with the research of transiting exoplanets. He investigates transit timing variations and dynamics of multiplanetary systems. In addition, he studies eclipsing binary stars. He also uses data from the Kepler and TESS space missions in his work.

Contacts:

  • email: pavol.gajdos @ asu.cas.cz
  • ORCID

PhD Students

Michaela Vítková

Michaela is a PhD student at Masaryk University in Brno. In her diploma thesis, she dealt with the detection of exoplanets via the radial velocity method using an iodine cell and the usage of the program Viper for spectra obtained by the Perek telescope. Now she will focus on studying Hot Jupiters and their role in multiplanetary systems.

Contacts:

  • email: michaela.vitkova @ asu.cas.cz

Zuzana Balkóová

Zuzana got her master’s degree in astrophysics at the Comenius University, Bratislava, SK, where she first became interested in exoplanetary science. Now she continues her research at the Charles University in Prague, CZ, focusing primarily on properties and atmospheres of giant hot planets determined from both photometric and spectroscopic observations.

Contacts:

  • email: zuzana.balkoova @ asu.cas.cz
  • phone:
  • personal website:

Jozef Lipták

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Contacts:

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Jiří Žák

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Contacts:

  • email: jiri.zak @ asu.cas.cz

PhD students (externals)

Martin Blažek

Martin is a PhD student of Masaryk University in Brno, CZ. He is an active member of the Exoplanet group and works mainly on photometric studies of exoplanets. He deals with detecting primary transits and also exoplanetary atmospheres through secondary eclipses. He is also an observer on 2-m telescope and uses both spectroscopic and photometric mode of the telescope.

Contacts:

  • email: martin.blazek @ asu.cas.cz
  • ORCID

Magdalena Špoková

Magda is a PhD student of Masaryk University in Brno, CZ. Her masters thesis was focused on astrobiology, she was exploring influence of solar wind-like conditions on cyanobacteria. Now she is going to explore composition of exoplaneary atmospheres and to try to find interesting elements there, which might be linked with life. Also she is still cyanobacteria and botanical enthusiast.

Contacts:

  • email: 393635 @ mail.muni.cz