Successful Defenses of INTER‑EXCELLENCE II Programme Projects

On Tuesday, 20 January 2026, an opposition review was held at CPS to evaluate the Interim Report of project LUABA24039 and the Interim Report of project LUAUS24032, both supported by the INTER‑EXCELLENCE II programme of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports.

Project LUABA24039

Development of Magnetoactive Elastomeric Surfaces with Controlled Wetting Characteristics for Functional Liquid Manipulation, led by Prof. Michal Sedlačík, Ph.D., in cooperation with Ostbayerische Technische Hochschule Regensburg (Germany), was launched 18 months ago and will continue for another year.

The main objective of the project is to prepare advanced magnetoactive elastomer surfaces with a predefined initial wetting character that can be further controllably modified in the presence of an external magnetic field. This would make it possible, for example, to adjust the wetting behaviour of water in air from originally superhydrophilic to hydrophilic, or from hydrophobic to superhydrophobic. A similar effect would apply to oleophilic and oleophobic surfaces in an aqueous environment.

Project LUAUS24032

Polymer Neural Synapses, led by Prof. Jarmila Vilčáková, Ph.D., in collaboration with the Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, is carried out together with Clemson University (USA) over a two‑year period and will continue for another year.

The project focuses on the synthesis of four new carbazole derivatives of dithienopyrrole—monomers for preparing conjugated polymers pCxDTP with different lengths of side alkyl chains—and on the fabrication of sandwich structures exhibiting memristive behaviour under both DC and AC electric fields. Selected polymers demonstrated the ability to mimic synaptic plasticity.

Both projects successfully defended their interim progress during the review process and will continue in 2026.