Publication date: 
2022/04/04
In early April, Miroslav Španiel took over the position of Dean of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the CTU in Prague. He graduated from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in 1988 with a degree in Applied Mechanics, and six years later he was awarded the degree of Candidate of Science in Mechanics of Rigid and Compliant Bodies and Environments. He received his habilitation in 2007 in the field of applied mechanics.

Docent Ing. Miroslav Španiel, CSc. has been working at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of CTU since 1991, successively as a researcher, assistant professor, docent, head of the Department of Elasticity and Strength and head of the Institute of Mechanics of Biomechanics and Mechatronics. Since 2014, he has been the Vice-Chairman of the Academic Senate and from 2017 to 2021 the Chairman of the Academic Senate of the Faculty of Mechanical and Mechanical Engineering of CTU in Prague. On 16 February 2022, the Academic Senate of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering elected him as a candidate for Dean of the Faculty at its 14th meeting and sent a proposal for his official appointment to the Rector of CTU. 

Miroslav Španiel's long-term professional interests include the application of the finite element method in engineering calculations, and in recent years he has been working on models of degradation, damage and failure of materials. He is a principal investigator or co-investigator of grants from the General Directorate for Research and Development, the Technical Research Centre, the Ministry of Industry of the Czech Republic and the Ministry of the Interior of the Czech Republic, and a leader of work packages at the Josef Božek Centre of Competence in the Automotive Industry and the Centre for Advanced Aerospace Technologies. He cooperated with industrial practice especially in the field of strength of piping systems and pressure vessels.

He guarantees courses in bachelor, master and doctoral study programmes, is a supervisor of doctoral students and a supervisor of qualification theses. Doc. Španiel is also a member of several professional organizations. He is a member of the Council of the Institute of Thermomechanics of the CAS, the disciplinary council of the Mechanics of Rigid and Compliant Bodies and Environments field of study at the CTU Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and member of disciplinary council of the Transport Means and Infrastructure field of study at the Faculty of Transport Engineering of the University of Pardubice. He is also a member of the main committee of the Czech Society for Mechanics and an evaluator of the Theta TAČR programme and has participated in several professional conferences. He has been cited many times as author or co-author of 17 publications in impacted journals.

Interview with M. Španiel:

How do you assess the situation at the faculty when you took office?

We have gone through a challenging period of pandemic that has affected teaching, research activities and other areas of faculty life. We have survived, the Faculty is in good shape and has the capacity to cope with the long-term consequences of the pandemic and the current challenges.

Which are the main goals you have set for yourself?

The basic goal is to achieve the right balance between the three main missions of a technical college - teaching, science and research at individual departments and the entire faculty. To do this, we need to update the system of evaluation of teaching performance and introduce continuous evaluation and quality control of teaching in individual subjects. I want to achieve an increase in the number of young docents and professors, especially by motivating them to publish their work and increasing the number of postdocs, which will also help to increase the necessary increase in scientific performance and to ensure the continuous accreditation of our study programmes. Large national and international grants are an important source of stable funding for the Faculty's scientific and research activities, and the Faculty aims to succeed in obtaining and fulfilling these grants. To coordinate and manage this area, I want to add a new Vice Dean to the organization. Service activities also play an important role in fulfilling the Faculty's mission. I want to gradually introduce more professional financial management of projects and institutes. In the area of cooperation with industry, the aim is also to attract partners for longer-term research and development collaborations and to offer attractive lifelong learning programmes to the professional public. I consider it an important and difficult task to present engineering fields to secondary school students not only as in demand and promising in society, but also as interesting and creative fields, and to attract them to study at our faculty.

 

Do you plan any major personnel changes?

 

I do not plan any changes at the beginning of the term, except for the aforementioned establishment of a new Vice-Dean for Projects and filling the position of Vice-Dean for Development. 

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Contact person: 
Name: 
PhDr. Ladislav Lašek
E-mail: 
ladislav.lasek@fs.cvut.cz