Physicist, Professor and Head of the Department of Physicochemistry of Soft Matter at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, and Member of the Supervisory Board of Scope Fluidics.
Graduated in theoretical physics at the University of Warsaw in 1986 and became titular professor of chemistry in 1998 (at the age of 35). He has worked in the USA (University of Washington), Germany (Max Planck Institute for Polymer Science) and France (École normale supérieure). He is a co-author of more than 300 publications cited more than 9,000 times (h=52; Google Scholar) and three textbooks on thermodynamics (including Springer-Verlag, 2012). He has patented 45 inventions and co-founded three start-ups (including Scope Fluidics and Curiosity Diagnostics). He has promoted more than 30 PhDs and accepted more than 30 post-doctoral fellows. Eight of his students are already professors in Poland, the USA and China.
He created two scientific competitions: the Gold Medal of Chemistry and the Dream Chemistry Award. He has lectured at Harvard, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, Ecole Normale, Max Planck Institutes, and in China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, Canada, Malaysia and Italy, among others. He has worked with Unilever, Samsung and Mitsui Chemicals. He led the reform of the organisation of science at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences, of which he was director.
He conducts research at the interface of thermodynamics, statistical physics, material chemistry and cell biology. He discovered the principle governing motion inside living cells and in complex fluids, generalised Einstein's formula for the diffusion coefficient of nano-objects in complex fluids (together with Karol Makuch and Tomasz Kalwarczyk), created a description of nonequilibrium states within the framework of global thermodynamics (together with Karol Makuch), gave formulas for the evaporation rate of liquids, demonstrating the incorrectness of the Hertz-Knudsen and Maxwell formulas (together with Marek Litniewski). He described the partitioning of space based on Laplasian eigenvalues (together with Olgierd Cybulski). Discovered new periodic minimal surfaces with high genus (together with Wojciech Góźdz).
He is currently working on mRNA action in cells and global nonequilibrium thermodynamics. In January 1999, he circumnavigated Cape Horn during the sailing voyage of the Zawisza Czarny to Antarctica.
During the 8th Silesian Science Festival KATOWICE, Prof Robert Holyst will give two lectures:
● ‘Nanorobots, molecular machines and biological machines’
We will hear about the nanoworld, the reality we would see if we shrunk a billion times. This is the world of the inside of all the cells in our bodies.
We will listen to how a nanorobot could work in this microscopic, or rather nanoscopic, world and how the principles of its operation and design should be approached.
We will listen about man-made nanomachines and compare them with those made by nature.
● ‘Myths about entropy’
There are two myths about entropy. The first says that the entropy of the universe is increasing and leads to its heat death. The second claims that entropy governs order and disorder in the universe.
In the lecture we will dissect each of these. We will also hear about energy, altogether more mysterious than entropy.