Dr. Viktor Krchnák studied chemistry at the Faculty of Natural Sciences of the Masaryk University in Brno, Czechoslovakia. He earned his PhD in organic chemistry from the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in Prague, under the supervision of Prof. Zdenek Arnold. After holding several industrial positions with small biotech companies in the US, he joined the faculty of the University of Notre Dame as a research professor in 2003.

His research interest covers combinatorial chemistry in general and solid phase chemistry in particular. His group introduced novel coding technique for the synthesis on modular solid support (necklace coding), a new concept for the solid phase synthesis of traceless heterocyclic libraries, cleavage of resin-bound compounds by gaseous reagents, the “split-split” method for the synthesis of sizable combinatorial libraries (up to 60,000 compounds), and instrumentation and logistics for high throughput organic synthesis. A number of his inventions have resulted in commercially available personal chemistry tools (www.torviq.com).