Activities — Our projects — MIT-Czech Republic IOCB Tech Foundation Seed Fund

MIT-Czech Republic IOCB Tech Foundation Seed Fund

We help develop collaborations between scientists from Czech institutions and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the U.S. We fund the MIT-Czech Republic IOCB Tech Foundation Seed Fund with $100,000 per year to support early-stage collaborations not covered by standard grant support.

The program was launched in 2021 as a collaboration of MIT, the Czech Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences (IOCB Prague), and its subsidiary IOCB Tech. Since 2022, it has been funded by our foundation, which contributes $100,000 annually.

Each year, the fund supports 3 to 5 new collaborations between scientists from research institutes and universities in the Czech Republic with their partners from MIT, providing up to $25,000 for each project. These funds can be used to cover travel and accommodation costs related to collaborative meetings and scientific internships.

2025/2026

16 September 2025 – Start of application submissions

Basic information about the grant can be found here, information on how to apply and a link to the application form can be found here.

16 December 2025, 11:59 PM (EST) – Application deadline

2024/2025

  • Analysis of potential phase separation of p130Cas protein and its dependence on tyrosine phosphorylation (Lindsay Case – MIT, Biology; Daniel Rösel – Charles University)
  • Multi-modal AI to predict mass spectra and discover molecular structures (Connor Coley – MIT, Chemical Engineering; Tomáš Pluskal – IOCB Prague, Czech Academy of Sciences)
  • Multimodal microscopy techniques combining raman, quantitative phase imaging for cancer related studies / MICROCOSM (Peter So – MIT, Mechanical Engineering; Jan Přibyl – Masaryk University)
  • Predictive physics for the edge of compact toroidal fusion devices (Jerry Hughes – MIT, Nuclear Science and Engineering; Fabien Jaulmes – Institute of Plasma Physics, Czech Academy of Sciences)

2023/2024

  • Control Systems for Digital Materials (Neil Gershenfeld – MIT, Media Arts and Sciences; Jiří Zemánek – Czech Technical University in Prague)
  • Development of Additively-Manufactured Electron Sources (Luis Velasquez – MIT, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Alexandr Knápek, Milan Matějka, Daniel Burda – Institute of Scientific Instruments of Czech Academy of Sciences)
  • The design and synthesis of highly active metallosilicate microspheres for olefin metathesis (Yuriy Roman – MIT, Chemical Engineering; David Škoda – Tomáš Baťa University in Zlín)
  • Understanding crystallization with ML-powered simulations (Rafael Gomez-Bombarelli – MIT, Materials Science and Engineering; Lukáš Grajciar – Charles University)

2022/2023

  • Electron Diffraction for Metal Organic Frameworks (Peter Mueller – MIT, Chemistry; Lukáš Palatinus – Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences)
  • FNS Gamma: Establishing cooperation in the field of fast neutron spectrometry in mixed fields of neutron and gamma radiation (Benoit Forget – MIT, Nuclear Science and Engineering; Zdeněk Matěj – Masaryk University)
  • Metabolic adaptation to aspartate synthesis deficiency in cancer (Matthew Vander Heiden – MIT, Biology; Kateřina Rohlenová – Institute of Biotechnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences)
  • Interaction of ionizing radiation with shielding and cladding materials with engineered strain distributions and phonon spectra (Michael Short, Benoit Forget, Svetlana Boriskina – MIT, Nuclear Science and Engineering; Lembit Sihver – Nuclear Physics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Mykola Ayzatsky – National Research Center “Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology”)

2021/2022

  • Predicting Function of Terpene Synthases with Machine Learning (Regina Barzilay – MIT, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Tomáš Pluskal, Raman Samusevich, Roman Bushuiev – Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences)
  • Institutional Data Shaping Digital History (Kurt E. Fendt – MIT, Comparative Media Studies/Writing; Jan Vondráček – Masaryk Institute and Archive of the Czech Academy of Sciences)
  • Q-boost4chemistry (Aram Harrow – MIT, Physics; Martin Friák – Institute of Physics of Materials of the Czech Academy of Sciences)
  • Clean Energy Applications with Mixed-Matrix Membranes of 2D MOFs (Mircea Dinca – MIT, Chemistry; Karel Friess – University of Chemistry and Technology, Prague)