He was the President of the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic, a professor of the Free University of Berlin, and a member of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.
Under communism, he was jailed for attempting to illegally cross the border in 1948 or 1949.
In 1966, he took advantage of a conference in Canada to emigrate, where he worked at Yeshiva University in New York City.
After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, he was readmitted to the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.
He was a world expert in the field of electrochemistry, quantum chemistry, quantum theory of surface phenomenon, photochemistry, and chemistry and physics clusters.