Bretislav Friedrich

In 1981-82, he was a postdoc with Jean Futrell at the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City, where he studied vibrational Feshbach resonances in low-energy charge-transfer scattering[5] and other elementary collision process. He then returned to the J. Heyrovsky Institute of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry as a research scientist. In 1986-87, he was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in the department of Peter Toennies at the Max-Planck-Institut für Strömungsforschung in Göttingen, where he studied inelastic proton scattering by atoms and molecules.[6]

In 1987, Bretislav Friedrich joined Dudley Herschbach's group at Harvard University, at first as a research associate. During the following sixteen years at Harvard, he developed techniques to orient and align gas-phase molecules by exploiting the interactions between their permanent and induced dipole moments and external electric, magnetic, and optical fields.[7] Together with the group of John Doyle at Harvard Physics, he also pioneered the study of cold molecules, by helping to develop the buffer-gas cooling technique and its combination with magnetic trapping.[8] In 1997, he was appointed Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer in Chemistry at Harvard University.

In 2003, he became a Research Group Leader at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin, Germany, where he has been based ever since. His current research is chiefly theoretical (with a predilection for an analytic approach), but closely related to ongoing experiments. It revolves around interactions of molecules with and in fields and branches out into areas such as super-symmetric quantum mechanics,[9] quantum computing,[10] and spectroscopy of molecules in helium nano-droplets.

Bretislav Friedrich and his wife, Christine Storch, have three children, Juliane (b. 2007), Christian (b. 2008) and Jitka (b. 2010). His daughter Jana (b. 1982), from his marriage with Helena Friedrich (1955–2002), is a graphic-design artist, living in Prague.

Alongside his scientific research, Bretislav Friedrich has maintained an abiding interest in the History of Science and has written on the emergence of quantum mechanics[11][12] and of physical and theoretical chemistry[13][14] as well as penned numerous biographical articles.[15]

In 2015, Bretislav Friedrich co-organized an international symposium to mark the centenary of the infamous chlorine cloud attack at Ypres in 1915. The symposium examined key aspects of chemical warfare from the first research on and deployment of chemical weapons in World War I to the development and use of chemical warfare during the century hence. The focus was on scientific, ethical, legal, and political issues of chemical weapons research and deployment — including the issue of dual use — as well as the ongoing effort to control the possession of chemical weapons and to ultimately achieve their elimination. A proceedings volume[16] consisting of papers presented at the symposium and supplemented by additional articles covers key aspects of chemical warfare from 1915 until this day.