Fifteen early-career researchers with young children to receive Martina Roeselová Memorial Fellowship support in 2026

Kateřina Azim Aburas is a PhD student in the Clinical Psychology and Health Psychology program at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, and the mother of a four-year-old daughter. Her research focuses on maternal mental health in relation to perceived social support and online communities. She is also working on validating the Czech version of a scale measuring postpartum anxiety. Thanks to the Fellowship, she will be able to combine her scientific work with caring for her daughter and travel with her for an international research stay.

Diana Hodulíková is a PhD student at the Faculty of Architecture of Brno University of Technology, where she focuses on the urbanism of cities in the Global South. She is interested in how informal settlements evolve over time – how their material form, spatial structure, and the quality of life of their residents change. Drawing on her experience with UNICEF in Addis Ababa, she is developing an evaluation matrix designed to support fairer urban planning and to create more child-friendly, climate-resilient public spaces. Her youngest research partner is now her one-year-old son, Sebastian.

Klára Kosová is a PhD student at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, and the mother of a one-year-old daughter and a four-year-old son. In her research, she seeks to connect the humanities and social sciences with computational approaches. She focuses on cognitive linguistics, political discourse analysis, and questions of legitimacy crises in contemporary democracies. In 2026, she will defend her dissertation and move into the postdoctoral stage of her career.

Barbora Kyereko is a PhD student in anthropology at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University. In her dissertation, she connects the anthropology of science with epistemologies of the Global South. Through an ethnography of the Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana, she examines how trust, knowledge, and research practices evolve within relationships between people and plants. She also cares for her four children, who accompany her on her long journeys.

Anna-Marie Marko is a PhD student at the Department of Archaeology, Faculty of Arts, University of Hradec Králové. Her research explores how Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in the pseudokarstic sandstone formations of northern Bohemia used stone tools. Using microscopic use-wear and residue analysis, she reconstructs their daily activities and site functions. Outside of research, she takes care of her one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Johanka.

Ashfa Sattar is a PhD student in Social Geography at the Faculty of Science, Charles University, where she studies women’s perceptions of safety in Prague’s public transport. Her research examines gender differences in urban mobility and, using surveys, interviews, observations, and the geographic information system, identifies ways to design safer and more inclusive transit spaces. Alongside her work, she is a solo parent to her three-year-old daughter, balancing caregiving with her academic responsibilities.

Aqsa Ahmad is a doctoral student and researcher at the Department of Experimental Plant Biology, Faculty of Science, Charles University in Prague. Her research aims to advance our understanding of how plant cells take up and transport key molecules and how these processes shape plant growth, working with Arabidopsis thaliana, a small flowering plant from the mustard family. Outside the lab, she shares her days with her four-year-old daughter, Ayat Fatima, whose curiosity often reminds her why discovery matters.

Aditi Chatterjee is a PhD student in the Department of Genetics and Microbiology at the Faculty of Science, Charles University, conducting her research at the Institute of Biotechnology of the CAS. Her doctoral work integrates genetic code expansion technology with spectroscopic and click-chemistry approaches to study the folding dynamics and kinetics of noncanonical photoreceptors. Alongside her research, she is also a mother to a little son who enjoys playing cricket and singing, and whom his kindergarten teachers often praise for his musical talent.

Zuzana Juhásová works at the Faculty of Pharmacy, Charles University, where her research focuses on medication safety. She studies the causes of hospitalizations resulting from adverse drug events and explores ways to identify such cases. She also investigates drug interactions, which often contribute to these events. Alongside her academic work, she cares for her daughter Lenka. Support from the Fellowship will allow her to maintain international collaborations and remain part of research teams that contribute to a better understanding of adverse drug events.

Jakub Kvorka is a researcher at the Department of Geophysics, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University. He focuses on heat and mass transfer in subsurface oceans hidden beneath the icy crusts of Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons. These environments, inaccessible to direct observation, attract scientific interest because liquid water above a rocky core may create conditions for simple forms of life. He studies nutrient circulation in these environments and possible methods for their indirect detection. Alongside his academic work, he also cares for his little son.

Marika Majerová is a PhD student in the Loschmidt Laboratories of Protein Engineering at the Faculty of Science, Masaryk University, and a mother of a 1.5-year-old son. She studies the molecular evolution of enzymes using light-emitting luciferases as model systems. In her research, she focuses on understanding how subtle changes in protein structure affect their function. A deeper insight into these principles will contribute to the development of innovative tools for the rational design of tailor-made biocatalysts with potential applications in research, medicine, and biotechnology.

Martina Mana works at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University and at the University of New York in Prague, and serves as a neuropsychologist at the Interse Prague outpatient clinic, where she focuses on the clinical assessment of patients with cognitive difficulties. She regularly publishes and presents her research findings at national and international conferences. She is also involved in the COSACTIW project, which explores the impact of physical activity on successful cognitive aging in women. Her goal is to connect scientific insights with clinical practice and to contribute to improving the quality of neuropsychological diagnostics. She is the mother of a 1.5-year-old daughter, Amálie.

Anna-Marie Poskočilová is a PhD student at the Faculty of Environmental Sciences, Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, where she studies the impact of human-driven changes on aquatic invertebrates, especially dragonflies (Odonata). She uses them as a model group to assess how light pollution and urbanization affect freshwater ecosystems, and is interested in how human interference alters their behavior and physiology. Outside the lab, she cares for her two small children, a daughter and a son, who remind her every day why it matters to protect the world they are discovering together.

Štěpánka Řehořková works at the Institute of Global Change Research of the Czech Academy of Sciences, where she studies the water cycle across the soil–plant–atmosphere continuum. She examines how external conditions influence transpiration rates in individual tree species and links these measurements with anatomical and chemical analyses of plants. As part of this research, she also collaborates with the Institute of Experimental Botany at Masaryk University. As a single mother of two young children (aged 4 and 6), she faces limitations when it comes to longer research stays abroad. Support from the Fellowship will help her better balance family and science and participate more actively in professional events.

Maria Pinilla Vargas is a Colombian biologist and a PhD student in the Department of Botany at the Faculty of Science, Charles University in Prague. In her research, she traces how tropical alpine plants evolved and diversified under harsh high-mountain conditions, with a special focus on rapid radiations that have shaped the high-mountain floras of the northern Andes. She also models past and future species ranges to understand how lineages respond to climate change and to help guide conservation priorities. She balances research with parenting a 1.5-year-old daughter, whom she hopes to raise as a nature enthusiast.