Forbes: I wanted to stop the brain drain, says the director of Neuron

How was the Nobel Prize an inspiration for the Neuron Foundation? Who chooses the award laureates? Where is the lake that Czech scientists discovered and named Neuron? What dream is the foundation fulfilling for a seventeen-year-old scientist? And how do they want to attract young people to science? Monika Vondráková, director of the Neuron Foundation, talked about this and more in an interview for the Forbes Byznys podcast of 29 January 2026.

It came into being at a time when posters with the slogan "Help Czech science" hung around Prague and when government funding for research had been halted by the economic crisis. The Neuron Foundation, at whose beginnings Monika Řasa Vondráková stood, wanted to stop the drain of scientific brains from the country and to attract them back.

"At the time I had spent over a year as a student in Israel, where I saw how they cherish and support their talents and try to keep them in the country. I was thinking about how to achieve something similar here," she recalls. She knew science was expensive, but at the same time, seventeen years ago, the word "scientist" made people picture an odd little man in a white coat shut away in a laboratory.

"I wanted to change that view and build something prestigious, to continue the ideas of the architect Josef Hlávka. Step by step Neuron came into being and the number of patrons grew," she remembers.

Among the first were Dalibor Dědek and Eduard Kučera. Gradually Libor Winkler joined, and among the younger ones Václav Dejčmar, Jaroslav Beck, Jan Bednář and Jan Hammer. At the foundation they approach above all those patrons who enjoy science.

"Every year we hold an event with an overnight stay, to which we invite both scientists and patrons and investors, because we think it is important to connect those two worlds, business and science," the director explains. Evidence that it works is the recent connection between the entrepreneur Jaroslav Beck and the scientist Tomáš Mikolov (a computer scientist and also a Neuron Award laureate), who founded a start-up together.

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Listen to the whole interview here: https://forbes.cz/chtela-jsem-zastavit-odliv-vedeckych-mozku-rika-reditelka-nadace-neuron/

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0Ck3bwDD57oCDhqELQ50BI