On the occasion of the academic celebration Dies academicus, several laureates of our faculty, whose work makes an exceptional contribution to the development of the university and higher education, received their awards today in the Karel Engliš Auditorium.
Peter Schmidt received the MU Rector’s Award for a Significant Creative Achievement
Peter Schmidt is a first-year student in the follow-up Master’s degree programme in Business Administration and Management at Masaryk University. He has long been engaged in projects at the intersection of innovation and social benefit. He gained experience in organisations such as Swiss Re, Teach for Slovakia, and Nexteria Leadership Academy, where he participated in strategy, innovation, partner acquisition, and talent development.
In 2025, he was a member of the winning iGEM Brno team, which won the Grand Prize in the Overgraduate category and the awards for Best Agriculture Project, Best Plant Synthetic Biology, and Best Presentation at the international synthetic biology competition in Paris. The team developed an autonomous vertical unit for cultivating fast-growing duckweed, which is intended to replace soy in feed mixtures, bringing not only immense economic savings for farmers but also a huge reduction in emissions for the planet. Peter was responsible for the marketing, PR, fundraising, and media communication of this historically most successful Czech-Slovak project at iGEM.
Dinara Alpysbayeva received the MU Rector’s Award for Outstanding Research Achievements for young scientists under the age of 40 in the fields of economics and informatics
Dinara Alpysbayeva holds a PhD in Economics from KU Leuven (Belgium, 2021). Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Skatteforsk Norwegian Centre for Tax Research (NMBU, Norway), she joined the Department of Public Economics at ECON MUNI in 2024.
Her research is in applied microeconomics, with a focus on labor and public economics. She examines labor market adjustment to economic shocks how firms, workers, and households respond, and the role of institutions in shaping the timing and form of these responses. Core topics include employment dynamics, labor reallocation, and institutional constraints such as employment protection and unemployment insurance. Her current agenda focuses on how financial conditions including income timing, liquidity, and financial uncertainty affect household labor supply decisions. Her work is empirical, drawing on rich administrative and firm-level data.
Štefan Lyócsa received the MU Rector’s Award for Long-term Outstanding Research Results in the field of economics and informatics
Professor Štefan Lyócsa focuses on research in financial markets. His long-term scientific work has contributed to a deeper understanding of price dynamics in financial markets. His research focuses on four key areas. The first area is the study of the interconnectedness of financial markets, with Professor Lyócsa being among the pioneers in the use of network approaches in this field. The second area is devoted to examining the spillover of crises between financial markets and the analysis of contagion effects in financial markets. The third key area focuses on the relationship between investor attention, that is, the information to which investors devote their limited attention, and the uncertainty of financial asset prices. The fourth area is the development of models aimed at improving the prediction of fluctuations in financial asset prices. Professor Lyócsa’s research thus contributes to understanding the mechanisms of reducing uncertainty in investment decision-making. In addition, he also participates in research in areas such as energy markets, the labour market, and the analysis of regional economic disparities.
His daily work consists of managing and organising several research teams, in which he is primarily responsible for the development of research ideas, methodology design, supervision, support, and the implementation of research studies themselves. Currently, at ECON MUNI, he teaches the courses AI in Finance and Statistics in Finance and serves as the guarantor of the doctoral programme Economics, Finance and Management.
This year’s recipient of the MU Rector’s Award for an Outstanding Teacher is Filip Červenka
Filip Červenka works as a lecturer at the Department of Economics of the Faculty of Economics and Administration and at the Research Institute for Labour and Social Affairs, where he focuses on applied socio-economic research. In the long term, he has focused primarily on issues of income and wealth inequality and the impacts of population ageing.
He received the MU Rector’s Award for Outstanding Teachers for his teaching of microeconomics and macroeconomics, which students appreciate for its clarity, comprehensibility, and emphasis on understanding economic contexts.
In his teaching, he strives to create an open environment that encourages the active involvement of students. He places special emphasis on the role of mistakes in the educational process and explains to his students that a mistake is not a failure, but rather a natural part of the learning process that can help them gain a deeper understanding of how things work.
He perceives his role as a teacher as a responsibility towards students and seeks to approach it with the utmost care. Whenever appropriate, he uses examples from current economic developments as well as his own experience from applied research in his teaching.
