Bretislav Friedrich
Bretislav Friedrich (born May 29, 1953 in Prague) is a Czech scientist known for his work on how molecules interact with electric, magnetic, and optical fields, and for research on cold molecules. He leads a research group at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin and is an honorary professor at the Technical University of Berlin. In 2011 he was elected to the Learned Society of the Czech Republic.
Education and career: Friedrich studied physical chemistry at Charles University in Prague, graduating in 1976. He earned his PhD in 1981 from the J. Heyrovsky Institute of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry for work on ion scattering in crossed beams. He was a postdoctoral fellow with Jean Futrell at the University of Utah (1981–82). He was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in 1986–87 at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, working on inelastic proton scattering. In 1987 he joined Dudley Herschbach’s group at Harvard University, where he helped develop methods to orient and align gas-phase molecules with external fields and contributed to the development of buffer-gas cooling and magnetic trapping for cold molecules. He became a Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer at Harvard in 1997, and in 2003 he moved to the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin to lead his own research group.
Research focus: Friedrich’s work is mainly theoretical, often using analytic methods, but closely tied to experiments. His interests include how molecules interact with electric, magnetic, and optical fields, as well as topics in supersymmetric quantum mechanics, quantum computing, and spectroscopy of molecules in helium nanodroplets.
Personal life and other work: He is married to Christine Friedrich and they have three children: Juliane (2007), Christian (2008), and Jitka (2010). He has a daughter, Jana (born 1982), from a previous marriage, who is an artist in Prague. Beyond science, Friedrich writes about the history of science and the development of quantum mechanics. In 2015 he co-organized an international symposium marking the centenary of the chlorine gas attack at Ypres in 1915, examining chemical warfare from its early days to today. The proceedings cover key ethical, legal, and scientific issues related to chemical weapons.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 18:20 (CET).