doc. RNDr. Jaroslav Dudík, Ph.D.

In 2005, he graduated with honors at the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics of Comenius University (FMFI UK) in Bratislava, where he also received the PhD in 2009. Subsequently, he became an assistant professor there for several years. Later, he served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, v.v.i., and in the NASA postdoctoral program in Huntsville, USA, which he left for personal reasons leading to a wedding. He was then a Newton International Fellow (Royal Society) at the University of Cambridge for two years. Since 2015, he has been working at the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, where he now leads the working group of solar flares and prominences. He lectured externally in Bratislava until 2018, and habilitated there in 2017. He currently serves as a panel member of the Grant Agency of Charles University and as the chairman of the competition Czech Astrophotography of the Month.

His research is primarily focused on solar flares and studies of 3D magnetic field reconnection, as well as non-equilibrium spectroscopy of the solar corona, transition region, and flares. He mainly uses data from space-borne instruments. He is a member of the Marshall Grazing-Incidence X-ray Spectrometer (MaGIXS) and Solar Orbiter/SPICE instrument teams, as well as members of teams designing new satellites for observing solar flares for the European Space Agency (ESA) as well as NASA. He is the author or co-author of more than 60 papers; his h-index is 20. In 2014, he discovered the process of slipping magnetic reconnection in solar flares, and in 2019, the rope-rope reconnection between the primary legs of the erupting flux rope. He also participated in two other discoveries of reconnection phenomena. In 2015, he received the Otto Wichterle Premium and in 2021, the honorary Kopal lecture awarded by the Czech Astronomical Society. He spends some of his free time birding or observing the night sky.