
Pavel Dvořák
Pavel Dvořák, Ph.D.
He is currently an associate professor at Masaryk University (MUNI), Brno, Czech Republic, and group leader at the Microbial Bioengineering Laboratory (MBL).
Pavel Dvořák is a molecular biologist by training. During his Ph.D. studies (completed in 2014), he worked in the protein engineering group of Jiri Damborsky (Loschmidt Laboratories) on the design of synthetic enzyme cascades for the degradation of halogenated anthropogenic pollutants in vitro and in heterologous bacterial hosts.
Pavel conducted his postdoctoral research (2015 – 2018) as a Marie S. Curie fellow in the laboratory of Víctor de Lorenzo at CNB-CSIC, Madrid, where he focused on microbial metabolic engineering and synthetic biology, working on the refactoring of Pseudomonas putida for the biotechnological processing of carbohydrates from lignocellulosic residues.
In 2019, Pavel established the MBL at MUNI, and since then, he has continued to push the boundaries of mesophilic and thermophilic environmental bacteria for biotechnology using tools of synthetic biology and metabolic engineering.
Pavel is involved in teaching, mentoring, science popularization, and local SynBio community building. He is one of the PIs of the successful Brno iGEM team, a member of the Bioengineering and Bioprocessing Division of the European Federation of Biotechnology, a member of the Early Career Committee of the International Metabolic Engineering Society (IMES), and an EUSynBioS Advisory Board member. He promotes engineering biology in the Czech Republic. He recently founded the web platform Czech SynBio Node, which aims to unite laboratories, companies, and other local partners interested in engineering biology.