Reports

On 21 May, the Academic Senate of the CTU approved the proposal to dismiss Vojtěch Petráček from the post of Rector of the university. At the proposal of the Senate, President Petr Pavel decided to dismiss Petráček on 30 May. The dismissal must still be signed by Prime Minister Petr Fiala.

In May, the Czech Technical University in Prague (CTU) hosted a meeting related to the ongoing project “Joint Cooperative Research Focused on the Transfer of Technological Knowledge and Qualification of Accident-Tolerant Fuel for New Nuclear Power Plants,” which aims to enhance the readiness of the Czech nuclear sector for the Korean APR reactor technology.

An extraordinary session of the Academic Senate of CTU was held on Wednesday afternoon, 21 May, with a single item on the agenda: a motion to dismiss Rector Vojtěch Petráček from his position, submitted on Tuesday 13 May by Senator Jiří Vokřínek. Rector Vojtěch Petráček is leading the CTU in his second term of office, which was due to end in January 2026, eight months from now.

Traditionally, the Rector's Sports Day is held in mid-May. This year the weather was really favourable to the last bit, it did not rain, nor was it unbearably hot. Thus, nothing prevented sports outdoors or indoors and the participation of students and staff in the Institute of Physical Education and Sport exceeded 1000 athletes in various sports disciplines.

At the Masaryk Institute of Advanced Studies of CTU, a creative team of educators is starting the initial phase of work on the continuation of last year's grant Strengthening Capacity and Knowledge Transfer at Higher Education Institutions for the Development of Affected Areas of Ukraine. The project is implemented with financial support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic under the CzechAid foreign development cooperation programme.

Ensuring crew self-sufficiency in space is one of the current challenges. Scientists from the Institute of Chemical Processes of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS) and other partners will contribute to solving it with the METRO experiment, which will investigate the control of gas transfer in microgravity for efficient long-term operation of space photobioreactors. Once tested, these could in the future provide astronauts with continuous production of oxygen and food from carbon dioxide and water. The experiment was selected by the Department of Transportation for implementation during the flight of Czech astronaut Aleš Svoboda to the International Space Station (ISS).

The document "Security Policy of CTU" came into force on 1 May 2025 as an order of the Rector. This is another crucial step by which the technical university protects its students, staff and academics as well as the general public.

Representatives of Czech entities met today with a Korean delegation under the auspices of the Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy to sign a set of cooperation agreements. The majority of these agreements concerned future cooperation at the Dukovany NPP; an exception was, for example, the memorandum signed by Rector Vojtěch Petráček on behalf of CTU in Prague and Chul Ho Kang, President of the Korea Institute For Robot Industry Advancement (KIRIA) on behalf of South Korea. Based on this cooperation between the university and KIRIA, an "Advanced Industrial Robotics Centre" should be established in Prague.

CTU Faculty of Architecture joins the network of top universities. The agreement on a new double degree programme with Politecnico di Milano expands the career prospects of its students. The cooperation will enable them to obtain nationally recognised degrees from both institutions. Architecture at Politecnico di Milano is ranked 1st in Italy, 5th in Europe and 7th in the world in the 2024 QS Rankings by Subject.

Avio Aero and GE Aerospace announced the certification of the Catalyst engine, the first all-new advanced turboprop engine of the 21st century. The development of the new Catalyst has been made possible, among other things, by the cooperation between CTU Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Avio Aero, which was concluded in 2016 on the basis of an aerospace research cooperation agreement.