Robert Hołyst, a professor at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences, graduated in theoretical physics from the University of Warsaw in 1986 and became a full professor of chemistry in 1998. He has worked in France (ENS Lyon), the USA (University of Washington), and Germany (MPI Mainz). He is the co-author of > 300 publications, cited > 10,000 times (h=56), and three textbooks on thermodynamics (including Springer-Verlag 2012).

He has patented 50 inventions and co-founded three start-ups (including Scope Fluidics and Curiosity Diagnostics). He co-founded the School of Sciences (now a faculty of the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University), where he served as vice-rector. He has supervised > 30 PhDs and accepted > 30 postdoctoral fellows. Eight of his students have become professors. He founded two scientific competitions, the “Gold Medal of Chemistry” and the “Dream Chemistry Award.”

He has lectured at Harvard (physics and chemistry), the Broad Institute, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, the École Normale, the Max Planck Institutes, and in China, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Canada, Italy, and elsewhere. He has collaborated with companies such as Unilever, Samsung, and Mitsui Chemicals. He successfully reformed the organization of science at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences, of which he was director.

He conducts research at the intersection of statistical physics, materials chemistry, and cell biology. He has discovered the principle governing diffusion within living cells, new periodic surfaces, the law governing evaporation, the partitioning of space based on the eigenvalues ​​of the Laplace operator, and the formalism of non-equilibrium global thermodynamics.