Computational physicist, drummer, group leader. I read signals — in matter, and in people: how they think, how fast they learn, how far they can go.
Some people read a CV. I read a trajectory. Give me enough contact with someone — a conversation, a piece of work, a hard problem — and I form a fairly precise picture of where they stand, how fast they move, and how much further they can go.
Competence is a point. Potential is a trajectory. I look at the derivative.
The level tells you where someone is. The slope tells you where they're going.
I look for competence, but more for slope. What happens when the problem turns unfamiliar? How quickly does the model in their head improve? What do they notice that others miss? How much order can they make out of ambiguity?
That judgment is a real part of what I'm paid for — whom to recruit, mentor, build a team around, and trust with a hard problem. It's the same reflex as the physics: look past the surface for the system underneath. Music sharpens it too — listening, timing, adjusting to the people around you.
Bottom-up, by default. I'd rather build a tool than inherit one — a two-temperature (TTM) code during my PhD, a plasmonic solver in Python, and large-scale machinery on top of Octopus; the next is a QEDFT code, written from scratch. Building from the ground up is how I understand a problem and keep control of the result.
Momentum that compounds — from a first paper (2013) to a granted European patent (2021) and, most recently, citations from the leaders of attosecond science (2025).
The HR-LIPSS process behind the Scientific Reports discovery — a granted European patent (EPO, 2021), designating essentially all European states. From a 2016 Czech priority filing, through the PCT (WO 2018/010707), to grant. Co-invented with I. Gnilitskyi, L. Orazi, N. M. Bulgakova and T. Mocek.
The striking regularity of laser-induced ripples on metals had no predictive explanation — until we traced it to a single quantity: the shorter the decay length of the surface electromagnetic wave, the more regular the ripples. That one correlation became a material-dependent criterion, and enabled high-speed manufacturing of highly regular structures on molybdenum, steel and titanium.
By shaping a mid-infrared field with its third harmonic, this work controls the instant of electron tunnelling into the conduction band of crystalline silicon — within each half-cycle, to attosecond precision. My real-time TDDFT simulations underpinned the interpretation.
Already cited by leaders of attosecond science — including 2023 Physics Nobel laureate Anne L'Huillier, Shambhu Ghimire (Stanford) and Marcello Ciappina.