Research & Projects
21. 7. 2025
Matyáš Kopecký
OP JAK – CZ.02.02.XX/00/23_019/0008466
The PUBUCH project focuses on supporting, innovating and enhancing the preparation of future chemistry teachers. During 2024–2027, our department will implement activities designed for students in the Chemistry Teaching for Secondary Schools programme and the educators involved in their training.
The main areas include work with national and special competency frameworks for teaching graduates, development and verification of courses for mentoring teachers, support for paired teaching with industry experts, workshops for educators in cooperation with Chemistry Centre leaders, establishment of university school status, educational courses for students and educators particularly in the areas of AI, virtual reality, modern teaching methods and Roma integration, and support for the prevention of academic failure.
Recipient: University of Chemistry and Technology, Prague in cooperation with the Archive of the Czech Technical University in Prague
Project Leader: PhDr. Bc. Věra Dvořáčková, Ph.D.
Project Duration: 2023–2027
The main objective of this project is to create a specialised public database as a permanent information and source tool – supported by newly developed software – for collecting, preserving and comprehensive analysis of unique information and data relating to the history of technical education and technical research.
Additional outputs will include an interactive map presenting the institutional and personal interconnections of technical research in the Czech lands and Czechoslovakia during the period 1707–1950, as well as a final monograph that will explore several understudied topics (e.g. women in technical sciences, reforms of tertiary technical education, relationships between technical universities and other technically-oriented research institutions, the significance of technical sciences for society, etc.).
The sense of disgust and its sources can take many forms. According to various classifications, we can differentiate among somatosensory disgust (which is driven by “innate” neural pathways and accompanies defensive reactions such as vomiting), anticipatory disgust (which develops in expectation of something perceived as nauseating), and simulated disgust (which occurs in the absence of triggers and only takes mental imagery to establish). Interestingly, the sense of disgust is seldom triggered by the physical nature of the stimulus. Specifically, it is rare for disgust to develop in reaction to the stimulus’ physicochemical properties alone, which are “translated” by the organism as perceptually unpleasant. Usually, it is our “higher” mental processes and their outcomes (such as beliefs, expectations, imagery, etc.), also referred to as top-down regulation, that produce the physical sensations of disgust and nausea. Food smells are no exception – the root causes of a person’s food disgust usually tend to be idiosyncratic associations with disagreeable objects and contexts, not perceptual dislike. As a result, introducing new foods into children's diets, overcoming neophobia, or increasing the acceptability of new food sources (such as edible insects) may prove extraordinarily challenging. While some foods/odor sources are typical triggers of disgust within a given culture, others are more ambiguous and difficult to describe. This ambiguity, in turn, may lead to dramatically different evaluations of disgustingness due to the raters’ diverse beliefs about the identity of the odors. Among the most influential beliefs are those related to pathogenic risk, and perceivers are particularly sensitive to cues that potentially suggest pathogenicity, which helps them avoid food poisoning and contracting infectious diseases. The question then is whether raters who identify a given ambiguous odor using labels suggestive of pathogenicity (e.g., carcass, decay, feces, intestines, manure, mold, rot, sweat, uncleanliness, urine, vomit) also find it more disgusting, (i.e., whether the top-down regulation of their olfactory processing leads to more pronounced perceived disgust). The project is conducted in collaboration with the National Institute of Mental Health.
Olfactory and gustatory processing is influenced not only by the psychophysical properties of the chemosensory stimuli, but also by the physiology of the individual and the environmental factors in which they are located. Isolated, confined, and extreme (ICE) environments are used to conduct analogue missions that serve as an accessible means to investigate the impact of various ICE environmental factors on crew health, to identify negative ones and prevent failures during future manned space missions. The availability of a diet that meets palatability requirements, among other factors, is one of the key elements that contribute to crew members’ psychological well-being. Since ICE stays are usually associated with changes in olfactory and gustatory (as well as other cognitive) functions, this project aims to investigate to what extent a ten-day stay in an underwater environment is reflected in changes in the crew's perception of basic tastes and olfactory abilities compared to a control group in the mission control centre. The project is carried out in cooperation with the Institute of Psychology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.