Assoc. Prof. Lucie Bacakova, MD, PhD, graduated from the Faculty of General Medicine at Charles University in Prague in 1984. She earned her PhD at the Institute of Physiology (IPHYS) of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in 1992. She completed research fellowships at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA (Prof. S.M. Schwarz, 1996), the University of Pavia, Italy (Prof. Carlo Pellicciari, 2000), and the University of Pennsylvania (Prof. D. E. Discher, 2000-2001). In 2005, she founded a new Laboratory of Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering at IPHYS. In 2022, she received the prestigious "Praemium Academiae" award. She has published more than 300 articles (WOS: 10,433 citations, h-index 47).