Bretislav Friedrich (born 29 May 1953) is a Research Group leader at the Department of Molecular Physics, Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft and Honorarprofessor at the Technische Universität in Berlin, Germany.

[3] Subsequently, he changed fields to study ion-molecule reactions in the gas phase and earned his Ph.D. degree from the J. Heyrovsky Institute of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences in 1981 for his work on ion scattering in crossed beams.

[4] In 1981-82, he was a postdoc with Jean Futrell at the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City, where he studied vibrational Feshbach resonances in low-energy charge-transfer scattering[5] and other elementary collision process.

During the following sixteen years at Harvard, he developed techniques to orient and align gas-phase molecules by exploiting the interactions between their permanent and induced dipole moments and external electric, magnetic, and optical fields.

Alongside his scientific research, Bretislav Friedrich has maintained an abiding interest in the History of Science and has written on the emergence of quantum mechanics[11][12] and of physical and theoretical chemistry[13][14] as well as penned numerous biographical articles.