Invited speakers

Zdeněk Weiss

Dr. Zdenek Weiss graduated in physics from the Charles University, Prague (1983). He started his career in the group of surface analysis at the concern ŠKODA, Plzeň. In 1991 he received the CSc (PhD) degree in plasma physics from the Institute of Plasma Physics, Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Prague. Then he spent several months as a postdoc in the spectroscopy group of Prof. Steers at the University of North London, UK, on the "Go west" fellowship of NATO. A year later he joined LECO Corporation, a US-based instrument manufacturer, and worked at various positions in this company in the area of R&D and the glow discharge optical emission spectroscopy (GDOES), in Germany, USA and the Czech Republic. In 2017 he joined the Institute of Physics (FZU) of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, and became the Head of the GDOES laboratory of FZU.

His research interests are twofold: (1) GDOES analysis of metals, inorganic coatings and thin films together with the corresponding methodology and (2) the fundamentals of GDOES. The latter area includes investigations of excitation mechanisms in glow discharges and related low temperature plasmas. This involves the analysis of GDOES spectra collected in a close collaboration with the spectroscopic group of Imperial College London, UK, on their high-resolution VUV-VIS Fourier transform spectrometer.

Dr. Weiss participated in several international research networks focused on analytical glow discharges, in particular the Marie Curie RTN "GLADNET" of the EU (2007-2011). He is a member of the Steering Committe of the European Working Group for GDS (EW-GDS). In 2014 he organized the 2nd International Glow Discharge Spectroscopy Symposium (2nd IGDSS) in Prague. In 2020 he was awarded the Edward Steers Memorial Award for the best glow discharge publication of the year.