“As a child, I didn’t even know that the work I do existed,” explains astrophysicist Tereza Jeřábková in an interview. Today, she is involved in international astronomical institutions and is also committed to the development of the astrophysics community and science in the Czech Republic. For her scientific work, she has become one of this year’s laureates of the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science programme.
Dr. rer. nat. Tereza Jeřábková
She works at the Department of Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics at the Faculty of Science, Masaryk University. Her research focuses on the formation of star clusters and how their properties relate to the evolution of galaxies.
After studying astronomy and astrophysics at Charles University, she obtained her PhD at the University of Bonn, where she defended her thesis with the distinction ‘summa cum laude’ and was awarded the prize by the Bonn-based Foundation of Physics and Astronomy for the best doctoral thesis in the field of physics and astronomy. She subsequently worked as a researcher at the European Space Agency (ESA) and as an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory (ESO).
In 2024, she received the prestigious MUNI Award in Science and Humanities (MASH), which led to her return to the Czech Republic after several years abroad to join the Faculty of Science. At the start of this year, she also became member of the ESA’s Astronomy Working Group.
How do you feel about becoming one of this year’s laureates of the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science programme?
I am absolutely delighted to be one of this year’s laureates and to be able to showcase my research and astronomy to other female students and younger schoolgirls.
I’m also glad that such an award exists in the Czech Republic at all and gives women the opportunity to raise the profile of their research. In my view, the Czech Republic is still lagging a little behind when it comes to the representation of women in society. And in technical and scientific fields, the situation is even worse.
It’s often the case that when a panel is specifically aimed at women in science, the discussion centres on how to balance family life and children. Yet nobody asks men about such things.
That’s why I think it’s brilliant to have an open forum that focuses primarily on research and seeks out outstanding female scientists to present to the public. Furthermore, the competition’s selection panel has a balanced representation of women and men who assess cutting-edge science and its contribution to society.
You mentioned that it is important for you to showcase your research to younger female students. What do you think can help women and girls gain greater confidence to pursue a career in science?
It strikes me that, as children here grow up in a male-dominated world, it can be difficult for them to find the motivation and self-confidence to choose a career in which they see only men. And today there really is no reason why half the population should be excluded from science. Quite the opposite, in fact – we are missing out on brilliant ideas and talent that we would otherwise have.
I see this myself here at our institute – all the undergraduate and postgraduate students who come to see me are female. When they see a woman doing this work, they can imagine that they could do it too.
Before we get to your journey into astronomy, what are you currently working on in your research and how would you describe it in simple terms?
I study stars – how they are born and how this has changed throughout the history of the universe. Stars are the building blocks of galaxies, yet they are often talked about as if they existed in isolation. Most of them, however, are born in star clusters, a bit like people in cities – and life in a city is different from life in isolation. Stars meet there, influence one another and sometimes even collide, and this affects the entire galaxy as well as which chemical elements are returned to the universe.
My research is quite broad and brings together many processes that we are not yet able to observe or describe properly in the distant universe. I therefore draw on what we can examine in detail within the Milky Way, and ask whether the same principles apply where the initial conditions were completely different.
The biggest question of all is: how much did the formation of stars and star clusters in the first galaxies differ from what we see today? In astronomy, we generally assume that stars form in the same way everywhere – and if that is not the case, it changes many of our conclusions about the distant universe. And when it doesn’t work, that is precisely what interests me most – why.
“As a child, I didn’t even know that the job I do today existed”
When you look back on your journey – from studying at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, through observatories and institutions abroad, to the Faculty of Science in Brno – was this a path you had planned from the start?
As a child, I didn’t even know that the job I do today existed. My parents never went to university; I grew up in a small village in the middle of the forest, and my world was quite small.
I did a lot of sport and later took part in various first-aid competitions, so I thought that one day I might end up working in first aid, for example.
It wasn’t until I attended seminars at secondary school that I met people from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics; that was my first turning point. The next one came when I decided to go and study there.
You completed an internship at ESO in Chile whilst you were still doing your Master’s degree. What was that experience like for you?
Petr Kabáth was working at the observatory at the time, and he opened up the possibility of doing an internship. I remember that my university didn’t want to let me go at first, but I wanted to make the most of the opportunity. So I flew to the observatory in Chile, and it was there that I decided I really wanted to devote myself to astronomy.
Whilst in Chile, I also encountered professional astronomy and came to understand how it works on a global scale. It came as quite a shock to me, as it was something completely different from what I was used to at university. I discovered that experts have differing opinions and that things are done differently in various institutions.
At the same time, I realised that pursuing a career in science is by no means easy. Lots of people graduate from university, but only a small percentage of us manage to secure a job in science. I realised that if I wanted to do science, it would take a lot of hard work.
You then chose the University of Bonn for your PhD and visited ESO several times during your studies. What led you to decide to pursue a scientific career primarily abroad?
When I was finishing my Master’s degree, I told myself that if I wanted a career in science, I probably didn’t want it in the Czech Republic. I was fascinated by how the scientific environment worked abroad; I felt that more interesting work was being done there, and I wanted to learn from the people involved in it.
A colleague from Chile had just started working at ESO at the time. I wanted to do my PhD there, but ESO operates in a similar way to the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences – it cannot award PhDs.
So I looked into the best way to secure this position, and that’s when I met my future supervisor, Professor Pavel Kroupa, who is one of the best-known Czech experts abroad, and he didn’t mind that I would spend two years of my PhD at ESO’s headquarters in Garching. That’s why I started my PhD under his supervision, and I even spent a year on La Palma afterwards.
As well as working at ESO, you’ve also worked as a researcher at ESA, where you’re now a member of an advisory group. What does this experience bring you?
It’s a very competitive environment, so I was absolutely delighted when I secured a position on the advisory group. In many similar organisations, people aren’t elected but appointed. However, ESA has decided to hold open selection processes for its advisory bodies, which I think is brilliant.
A seat on the advisory group is excellent training for me. We assess proposals for new space missions, so I get to see the whole process from start to finish, and that’s an invaluable experience for me.
At the same time, it’s a huge responsibility towards the whole community. Recently, for example, we recommended which of the proposed M-class missions ESA should select – and such a decision will affect the work of hundreds of people and their research for many years to come. In my view, many applications would be much better if the applicants had also gone through this process.
How would you like to put your experience from the ESA advisory group to good use?
One of my goals is for the Czech Republic to lead a space mission within the next five to ten years. To achieve this, however, we need to support both science and industry, bring them together, and make the most of our participation in ESA and ESO projects.
Membership of these organisations is certainly not cheap, and it is up to us to get the most out of our membership. On the one hand, I am now gaining the necessary know-how, but also making contacts, so it will be easier to find collaborators.
At the same time, I am delighted that I can already represent smaller countries within the group and fight to ensure they have a voice within the agency.
“In Brno, I felt as though I was still abroad”
In a previous interview, you said that you couldn’t imagine pursuing a research career in the Czech Republic. What finally convinced you to return to Brno?
When I moved to Germany, I was offered a permanent post at ESO. I saw it as winning the lottery – I’d landed the job I’d always wanted, and I thought I’d stay in Germany for a long time.
But I always felt a bit guilty about having studied for free in the Czech Republic and not giving anything back. Nevertheless, I wanted to wait to return until I’d gained enough experience and established my career.
Then, however, I met Norbert Werner in Germany, who had come to ESO to visit his colleagues, and he invited me to Brno.
At the Faculty of Science, I saw just how much the Czech scientific community had changed. Thanks in part to Rikard Sebastian von Unge, Director of the Department of Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics, and the MUNI Award in Science and Humanities (MASH) grant, the department looked completely different from how I remembered the Czech scientific community when I left. There were lots of people from abroad at the institute; they wanted to develop and grow.
It was then that they suggested I might like to apply for a MASH grant.
You eventually secured the MASH grant and were the first woman to win it. How difficult was it for you to leave Germany, where you were working at the time?
I hesitated for a long time about whether to apply for the MASH grant at all. In Germany, I had a permanent post, which I’d secured relatively soon after my postdoctoral position, and I was also on one of the best salaries I could have had there within an international organisation.
It wasn’t at all easy to decide to return to the Czech Republic.
Gradually, however, various factors came together – personal reasons as well as thinking about what opportunities I might have in the Czech Republic compared to those in Germany. At the same time, I realised that if I had my own grant, I could offer my postdocs and students very good conditions in Brno.
In the end, I decided to give it a go at the last minute – it worked out, and I’ve now been back in Brno for over a year.
And when you returned to the Czech Republic after years abroad, how did you perceive the Czech astronomy community? Was there anything that surprised you upon your return?
I studied in Prague, so Brno was a bit of a new experience for me, but I felt great here.
Many of my collaborators are in Vienna, which I think is a big advantage for Brno – Vienna is close by, so you can seek out collaborations and contacts there. That can also be useful for students or postdocs in their research.
In Brno, I basically felt as if I were still abroad. At the institute, we all speak English, the science here is excellent, and my colleagues are open-minded. At the same time, we’re managing to attract other international colleagues – two new people are actually joining our department right now thanks to MASH JUNIOR.
I think we’re doing absolutely brilliantly in our little astronomical enclave here in Brno.
As for the rest of the Czech astronomical community, the reception has also been positive. I may have noticed a few minor hiccups, but overall we’ve had great success.
Recently, you’ve also been trying to involve the Czech Republic in major international astronomical projects, such as the development of the ANDES spectrograph. Why do you think participation in such projects is important for Czech science?
I think it’s important that, as scientists, we make the most of the funding allocated to scientific organisations. We should strive to invest in projects that will take us forward.
It goes hand in hand. If we manage to get involved in ANDES, we’ll have plenty of people working on the project who will become the leading experts on that instrument. We’ll also have access to the initial test data and be guaranteed time on the instrument. At the same time, this will make our scientific environment more attractive to international researchers, and the whole scientific community will grow as a result.
If we start taking part in large-scale projects like this, it will help the development of Czech science. And just imagine if Czech companies were to build part of such an instrument.
“It was important for me to meet people from other departments”
At the Faculty of Science, you’re also involved in the recently established Junior Faculty. What attracted you to this initiative and why did you decide to be part of it?
When my colleagues contacted me to ask if I’d like to get involved in the newly emerging initiative, I was absolutely delighted. It was important to me that I could meet people from across the campus or other participants in the PI seminars and find out what my colleagues are working on or how the different departments differ from one another.
I have to say that our faculty is truly amazing. We all realise how important it is to bring people together – that’s one of the aims of Junior Faculty, and I think that aim was achieved quite quickly.
We discovered that, as young people who’d mostly returned to the university from abroad, we have a lot in common, even though we’re all engaged in different fields of science and research. We’d also run into the same kinds of problems in academia.
What issues and challenges have you raised within the Junior Faculty?
We’ve come across situations, for example, where people secure a grant and put together a team, but then fail to secure a grant the following year and the team falls apart. When they do secure a grant again, they have to recruit and train new people from scratch. In such cases, it might help if the university offered some form of short-term support.
However, it is important to note that this is not about complaining about what isn’t working, but also about seeking ideas on how to improve conditions and make the faculty even more attractive to high-calibre researchers.
That is precisely why we would like to bring our experiences from abroad to the faculty and offer a slightly different perspective on matters than, for example, the Academic Senate, which has a somewhat different role.
We would like the faculty to function well for young, enthusiastic people with research grants, because that is exactly the sort of people we want here if the university is to be successful and continue to develop.
You mentioned that Junior Faculty primarily brings together people from different disciplines who may have different approaches to science. Why do you think such diversity is important for science?
When a researcher sits alone in their office, focusing solely on their research in isolation, they fail to connect with the wider scientific ecosystem. We need to be able to communicate science and utilise it to benefit industry, which in turn will help us researchers.
It’s also important that we communicate with the public and are able to convey the significance of our research to them. I think we should be grateful to society for funding our research. Using those funds in a way that benefits the whole community is, in my view, part of our job.
Do you have an example from your own experience where different perspectives helped to solve a scientific problem?
I remember one scientific project where we were trying to work out the best way to identify star clusters and their tidal tails. We read a lot of literature and tried to figure out how this might work best.
At one conference, I got talking to an elderly gentleman who’d been retired for a long time, and he remembered another method that used to be employed to determine the distance to star clusters. We don’t normally need that method today, as newer satellites measure distances for us, but the gentleman mentioned that the method could also be applied retrospectively.
Thanks to this, I have written an article – which was the lead story on the ESA website for some time – about the enormous tidal tails of the Hyades (note: a star cluster in the constellation Taurus).
There are certainly more examples like this. For instance, one of my Master’s students is collaborating with mathematicians. When we describe a problem to them, we often find that the mathematicians already have their own name for it or a method they use to tackle it. Thanks to this, we can learn new ways of solving our problems in astronomy.
“Space offers a wide range of career opportunities and is a fascinating field to explore”
Where do you see the Brno astronomy community in a few years’ time? And what role could the Faculty of Science play in it?
I really hope we manage to establish a centre for astronomy in Brno. I think we have great potential – we already offer the subject here from bachelor’s level onwards.
I’d like us to succeed in attracting students, modernising our teaching, drawing in people from abroad, and focusing more on collaboration with ESO and ESA – so that ANDES, for example, is just the first step.
Our faculty is already leading the scientific side of QUVIK, the first Czech space telescope, which is a huge success. And I hope that when we have an ESA scientific mission, the principal investigators will also be from our faculty.
When you meet students and early-career researchers at the faculty today, do you have any advice or recommendations for them?
In my view, it’s all very individual, but it’s certainly incredibly important for students to do what they enjoy. And if they don’t enjoy something, they need to work out why.
For example, during my studies, I didn’t enjoy a lot of the lectures either; some lecturers demotivated me and I wondered whether I wanted to do astronomy at all. So the fault may not lie with the students, but you need to be honest with yourself and communicate with both fellow students and lecturers.
You yourself spent a lot of time abroad whilst you were studying. What are the benefits of visiting universities and research institutions in other countries?
Whenever I have the chance to speak to students, I try to share opportunities and offers with them that might help them go abroad.
I’ve also come across students who really love it in Brno and don’t want to leave. But for me, it’s really important that they aren’t afraid to look elsewhere too.
For example, one of my Master’s students won a place at a prestigious observatory in Chile, and I think it was a completely transformative experience for her. We’ve also helped other students secure internships at ESA, because experiences like these can help them discover what they enjoy.
And even if they realise it’s not the right path for them, at least they’ll have gained some experience. Studying and doing science is really hard, after all. You have to compete for most things, and with every success comes a lot of setbacks. You have to learn to accept this and always take the positives from it.
Because once students realise they enjoy their field of study or research and remain curious, that’s the most important step. They’ll manage the rest.
What do you think could help young people take that first step towards science? And find out whether it’s the right path for them or not?
Together with the Brno Observatory and Planetarium and its director Jiří Dušek, 'the Zvaž vědu! (Consider Science) initiative' and our faculty, we’re organising 'Generace Vesmír (Generation Universe)' – a day for secondary school pupils aimed at motivating them to take up astronomical research. ‘Consider Science!’ is run by young people themselves, and that’s important to me: you communicate best with your own generation. We want to show just how many different professions come together in the field of astronomy, from science to engineering.
The event will take place on 8 February 2027. I’m really excited about it, because when I was at secondary school, I couldn’t have imagined what a career in science entailed or what opportunities were available. At the same time, it’s an opportunity to reach out to pupils before they even get to university and start building a community amongst younger students.
We’d like to show secondary school pupils that space offers a wide range of career opportunities and can be a truly fascinating field to explore. The world’s largest telescope is being built right now, and the people who are in secondary school today will one day be working with it. Hopefully, we’ll succeed in inspiring the next generation to get involved too.
Photo: L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Award
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