Michal Hocek is a Distinguished Chair group leader at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences and a full professor at the Dept. of Organic Chemistry of the Charles University. He received his PhD in organic chemistry from the Czech Academy of Sciences in 1996 and did a postdoctoral stay at the Universite Catolique de Louvain in Belgium. Then he joined IOCB as staff scientist and since 2003 as group leader. Since 2011 he has joint appointment at the CU and in 2014 he was named full professor. He received several awards including Otto Wichterle Premium in 2004, Praemium Adacemiae in 2015 and R. Lukes Prize in 2019 and was recipient of many research grants (including prestigious EXPRO grant from Czech Science Foundation).

His research interests span from synthetic and medicinal chemistry of nucleosides and nucleotides to bioorganic chemistry and chemical biology of nucleic acids. He has served three times in ERC CoG evaluation panel PE5.