Remembering prof. Vojtěch Konopa

Prof. Vojtěch Konopa died on Saturday 9 April at the age of 75. On behalf of the whole Institute we express our sincere condolences to the family. His loss is very sad news for us.

Prof. Vojtěch Konopa (left) with the first director of CXI doc. Petr Tůma.

Vojtěch Konopa and CXI

There are not many at TUL who could boast such a significant personal involvement in the development of the university as Vojtěch Konopa. He came to Liberec in 1989, at a time of revolutionary political, organisational and personnel changes, with experience gained in practice and while teaching at the CTU. He came with ideas that he could enthuse about, visions that he could communicate, and also with unprecedented vigour. He soon became convinced of his qualities, and in the course of time he became vice-dean, vice-rector, dean and rector. He perceived the fact that he had joined the university at the beginning of its transformation from a VŠST to a Technical University as his lucky opportunity. Fortune favoured the prepared, and so it was also thanks to his work that new faculties were established at the University of Liberec. His contribution to the establishment of the Faculty of Mechatronics was particularly significant, where he soon found space for his teaching and scientific work.

Vojtěch Konopa was elected rector at the moment when the modernisation of the education structure was completed at TUL, i.e. new faculties started to work well alongside the traditional ones. The area in which shortcomings persisted was the technical condition of the laboratories. In solving this problem, Rector Konopa followed in the footsteps of his predecessor and actively developed the plan to give TUL a generously proportioned L building full of well-equipped laboratories. Prof. Konopa saw even further. He began to develop the idea of creating an organisationally independent and inter-faculty department with the ambition to bring faculties together and provide them with space for synergistic cooperation.

Thus CxI was born.

In his own way, Prof. Konopa came, saw and won. Unfortunately, as we write these words, Vojta is no longer with us. On a personal level, he will be sorely missed by many of us. On a professional level, we miss his drive, enthusiasm and vision long time ago, his illness has long prevented him from working, although it was always obvious that he would have liked to continue his work.

Vojt needs to be thanked from afar. He co-created concepts and was able to push them through and trusted us to implement them. In doing so, he created an exceptionally high quality and humanly pleasant working environment for many of us.

His vision lives on at TUL and let us hope that a personality with positive thinking, a sense of perceiving and changing reality, correctness in solving problems and other values that Vojta personified will soon emerge.

R.I.P.