Bretislav Friedrich (born 29 May 1953) is a Research Group leader at the Department of Molecular Physics, Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft and Honorarprofessor at the Technische Universität in Berlin, Germany. He is globally recognized for his pioneering research surrounding interaction of molecules with and in electric, magnetic, and optical fields as well as on cold molecules. He was admitted to the Learned Society of the Czech Republic in 2011. Biography Bretislav Friedrich was born in Prague, Czech Republic on 29 May 1953. He graduated, in 1976, in physical chemistry from Charles University in Prague, with a diploma thesis on deviations of dilute macro-molecular solutions in mixed solvents from the ideal behavior. Subsequently, he changed fields to study ion-molecule reactions in the gas phase and earned his Ph.D. degree from the J. Heyrovsky Institute of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences in 1981 for his work on ion scattering in crossed beams. Academic career 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 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. 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. 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. 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