"I see my appointment as rector as the beginning of the third stage of my life and, in a way, my final mission. I have been involved in artificial intelligence for a long time and I want to contribute to creating a generation at CTU that will be successful in the world of AI explosion," says Michal Pěchouček. But he has many more plans.
From the beginning of his candidacy, the newly appointed rector made no secret of his ambitions to bring CTU to the absolute top of the world's universities. "Among the main problems we need to solve are the low citation rate of our scientific work, low productivity, and overly widespread academic inbreeding. We should attract more high-quality candidates for academic positions from abroad and not rely solely on local resources. I consider it necessary to establish more active cooperation with world-class universities so that we are not closed off to the outside world. I would like us to develop more intensive cooperation with industry and support the creation of new startups and spin-offs."
According to Michal Pěchouček, CTU should be a place that attracts the most talented individuals. He plans to lead the university in such a way that each future generation of CTU students will be more successful than the previous one. He wants to achieve this goal through partial but ambitious changes, including the development of the Dejvice campus, improvements to student housing, higher salaries for experts, and the recruitment of top scientists and students from abroad.
In 2000, Michal Pěchouček founded the Center for Artificial Intelligence at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague, from which he graduated, and he continues to serve as its director. He gained international academic experience in California, Canada, and the United Kingdom. He boasts a high number of citations in renowned scientific journals (h-index 41 in Google Scholar).
He has been a member of the senior management of several major multinational technology companies and also has experience in technology transfer and start-up founding from his position as an investor. He is a philanthropist and sponsors, among other things, the People in Need educational program: One World in Schools. In 2023, he received the Karel Kramář Medal for lifetime achievements in research and science, awarded by the Prime Minister.
At the helm of CTU, Michal Pěchouček replaces Vice-Rector Zbyněk Škvor, who was appointed to lead the university after the CTU Academic Senate dismissed the current rector, Vojtěch Petráček, in May last year. In the CTU rector election in October 2025, Pěchouček received 28 votes and convincingly confirmed his position in the competition with two other candidates.
Image source - Office of the President of the Republic, photo by Tomáš Fongus, OPR
Translated with Deepl.com (free version)