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 Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 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:
- email: johnysubjak @ gmail.com
- phone: +420 323 620 164
- personal website: www.jansubjak.com
- ORCID
Jiří Žák
Jiri is a postdoctoral researcher specializing in the architecture of exoplanetary systems. He completed his PhD in 2024 at the European Southern Observatory and the University of Jena. His research focuses on the migration of gaseous planets and the characterization of resonant chain systems. He is particularly interested in connecting planetary dynamics with atmospheric composition to better understand how planets form and evolve. Jiri is actively involved in the PLATO and Ariel missions, where he chairs the Stellar Obliquity WG. Outside of research, he enjoys playing disc golf and drinking mate.
Contacts:
- email: jiri.zak @ asu.cas.cz
- phone: +420 323 620 164
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:
Jozef Lipták
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