Milos V. Novotny

Milos V. Novotny, a native of Brno (Czech Republic), is Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Adjunct Professor of Medicine at Indiana University. He has resided with his family in Bloomington (Indiana) for more than 50 years.

Milos Novotny was raised and educated in Brno, studying at Masaryk University, where he received the degrees of Magister and RNDr (Biochemistry) and Dr.Sc. (Chemical Sciences). Before emigrating to Sweden in January 1968, and later to the U.S.A., he was for 3 years on the research staff of the Institute of Analytical Chemistry of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in Brno. While working at Royal Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, he accepted the Robert A. Welch Postdoctoral Fellowship at University of Houston (Texas) during 1969-1971. In August 1971, he was appointed to the faculty of Indiana University (IU) where he rose through the ranks to a full professor, James H. Rudy Professor, Lilly Chemistry Alumni Chair, and Distinguished Professor.

At IU Milos Novotny established strong and internationally recognized research group playing a major role in developing modern chromatographic and electrophoretic analytical techniques. He was a pioneer in the preparation of glass capillary GC columns and coupling of capillary GC with mass spectrometry; later on, in capillary LC, capillary SFC, and in the early developments in capillary electrophoresis. As a member of the NASA Viking 1975 Science Team, Novotny designed the miniaturized GC column to search for organic molecules on the Planet Mars. In the search for new LC microcolumns, miniaturized detectors and capillary LC-MS methodologies, Milos Novotny educated numerous students and research associates to become future leaders in academia and in top industrial positions. He received several teaching awards at IU.

For his research accomplishments, Dr. Novotny has been recognized by more than 40 different awards, medals and other distinctions at three different continents. Among the most prestigious are 4 awards from the American Chemical Society: Chromatography (1986); Chemical Instrumentation (1988); Separation Science and Technology (1992); and Analytical Chemistry (2005); also Ralph N. Adams Award in Bioanalytical Chemistry (2008). He was named the R&D Magazine Scientist of the Year in 1994. His international awards include Marcel J.E. Golay Award and A.J.P. Martin Gold Medal (U.K.). Milos Novotny received honorary doctorates from Uppsala University (Sweden) and Charles University in Prague. He was elected to two foreign academies: Royal Society for Sciences (Sweden) and Learned Society of Czech Republic. His research interests remain wide-ranging, from separation science to structural analysis of biological molecules to proteomics and glycoscience, to chemical communication in mammals. He and his coworkers have been credited with structural identification of the first mammalian pheromones.  He has co-authored over 540 articles, reviews and patents, which are widely cited (h-index 102).

While maintaining extensive international scientific collaborations, Dr. Novotny has particularly intensified contacts in his homeland after the Velvet Revolution in 1989. He has collaborated with the scientists at Charles University, Masaryk University, University of Pardubice and University of South Bohemia. The Czech Academy of Sciences honored him with J.E. Purkynje Medal and the Jaroslav Heyrovsky Medal for advancing chemical sciences. After retiring from Indiana University in 2011, Dr. Novotny held a part-time research position at the Masaryk Memorial Cancer Institute in Brno.