This issue devotes full attention to the preliminaries of voting for a new president of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS). The new president will assume his/her office in March 2017 and will serve for four years. As head of the CAS, he/she is its chief representative and also administrator of the Academy’s budget. After his/her selection, he/she will be nominated to the post by the president of the Czech Republic. The candidate will be selected at the XLIX Meeting of the Academic Assembly on December 15, 2016.
The only candidate for a new president of the CAS is Professor Eva Zažímalová, the member of the Academy Council of the CAS. She has worked at the Institute of Experimental Botany of the CAS (formerly the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences) as a scientific employee since 1977 and since 2012 also part-time at the Biology Centre of the CAS. Since 2004, she has led the Laboratory of Hormonal Regulation in Plants at the Institute of Experimental Botany of the CAS. In 2007–2012, she was the Director of this Institute. In 2013, she was named Professor in the field of Plant Anatomy and Physiology at the Faculty of Science of the Charles University in Prague. Professor Eva Zažímalová deals with research into the phyto-hormone auxin – its metabolism and molecular mechanisms of its activity and transport in plant cells. She has been involved in numerous domestic and foreign research projects, is the author or co-author of original scientific works published primarily in renowned international journals and wrote chapters in specialized monographs. Without self-citations, her work has been cited more than 2900 times.