 He enrolled in a PhD program at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry in the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague (IOCB) under the tutelage of Dr. Antonín Holý, completing his studies in 1996.In 1997, Hocek performed a one-year postdoctoral fellowship under the guidance of Léon Ghosez at the Université catholique de Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium).He returned to the IOCB and Holý's laboratory, where he worked as a staff scientist for five years from 1998 to 2002.