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Pavel Plevka (1979) is a Czech structural biologist and a head of the Structural virology laboratory at Central European Institute of Technology, Masaryk University (CEITEC MU) in Brno, Czech Republic. His research is mainly focused on structural studies of picornaviruses, flaviviruses, and bacteriophages.

Education and Career
Plevka studied at the Charles University in Prague, where he received MSc degree in virology. For his doctoral studies he moved to the Upsala University in Sweden, where he worked in laboratory of Lars Liljas. During his PhD he used X-ray crystallography to study structure of small icosahedral viruses. After his graduation in 2009, he joined the research group of Michael Rossmann at Purdue University, Indiana, USA as a postdoctoral researcher. He used cryo-electron microscopy (Cryo-EM) and X-ray crystallography to study human enterovirus 71, dengue virus (DENV) and rubella virus. In 2013 he moved back to the Czech Republic where he established his own research group at Central European Institute of Technology, Masaryk University (CEITEC MU).

Research impact
Pavel Plevka’s group research focuses mainly on structural studies of the viruses from the order Picornavirales infecting humans (Enteroviruses, Rhinoviruses) and honeybees (Iflaviridae [cit] and Dicistroviridae [cit]). In 2018, the novel mechanism of the picornavirus genome release based on the pentamer dissociation from the viral capsid was discovered [cit] in Plevka’s lab. Plevka also studies Flaviviruses (DENV [cit]) and his team was the first to solve the structure of the Tick-borne encephalitis virus (TBEV)[cit]. Another major research topic is structural studies of bacteriophages which can be potentially used in the phage therapy [cit].

Selected awards
The Werner von Siemens prize for an outstanding basic research - 2020

The Neuron prize for extraordinary young scientists in biology - 2016

Selected grants
The European molecular biology organization (EMBO) installation grant – Structural studies of human and honeybee viruses (2015)

The European research council (ERC) starting grant – “PicoStructure” for structural studies of human picornaviruses. (2014)