Skip to main content

Meet Aleš Hála, leader of IMPULSE Work Package 6

11 May 2022

Aleš Hála is the Head of Technology Transfer and Industrial Liaison Office at ELI Beamlines. With his team, he is supporting his colleagues to successfully transfer the outcomes of their research results into real-life applications, as well as industrial users to take benefit from top-class research infrastructures. Aleš graduated from the Masaryk University in Brno where he studied at the Faculty of Economics and Administration, and later he enrolled at the Industrial Property Training Institute which provided a complex view into the protection of industrial property (IP) and knowledge about the position of industrial rights in the legal system. Aleš has an educational background in electrical engineering and regional development as well.

At the beginning of his career, he engaged in promoting the Czech Republic as a destination for foreign direct investments in microelectronics and semiconductor manufacturing and design. Then he joined the team of CzechInvest and soon became the Head of the Czech Technology Accelerator Project. Aleš started to work at ELI Beamlines Facility in 2011, and a year later he founded the Centre for Innovation and Technology Transfer with the support of the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports.

As WP6 leader his principal task is to plan and coordinate all WP6 activities, inform stakeholders about developments, and ensure that the objectives of the WP are implemented. “It is exciting to see how curiosity-driven research and fundamental science can impact our society in fields like medicine, clean energy, or development and testing of new materials,” says Aleš. “In my daily work, I coordinate different professional areas (law, business development, project management) aiming at forming fruitful collaborations with industrial partners such as beamtime users, technology co-developers, and basically anyone who benefits from our inventions – I really enjoy meeting and working with inspiring people.”

Working in the IMPULSE project, he sees the geographical distance between the ELI Facilities as the biggest challenge, as he considers personal engagement and communication as a key to operating effective and well-working groups. According to Aleš, the main objective of his WP is to find common ways of fostering innovation at a distributed research infrastructure such as ELI. This is highly important internally as well as externally: internally, it shows the ELI personnel that they are capable of producing valuable innovative applications of which they can be proud, and externally, it demonstrates through outreach activities that ELI can contribute to solving grand societal challenges such as global warming, ultrafast communication, curing lethal diseases, and many others.

“From my point of view, the main mission of IMPULSE is to make everyone see how the mutual collaboration between big science and industry can work for all of our benefits. I believe that the IMPULSE project will demonstrate the importance of ELI’s involvement in industrial developments for long-term sustainability.”

If you haven’t had a chance to meet Aleš yet, feel free to reach out with any questions at Ales.Hala@eli-beams.eu.