Administration

University Structure

President

Rudi H. Ettrich, RNDr. MSc. PhD.
President/ Chief Executive Officer

Dr. Rudi H. Ettrich became the first full-time president of Larkin University on December 5, 2018. A higher education professional with extensive experience in the field of biomedical sciences with 25 years of experience working in a university and academic setting, Dr. Ettrich expertly guided the institution through the institutional accreditation process and the challenges of the global pandemic, all while advancing its progress and establishing an exceptional strategic framework for the future.

Dr. Ettrich earned his undergraduate degrees from Eberhard-Karls-University in Tübingen, Germany, and Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. In 2001, he completed his doctorate in physical chemistry at Charles University, focusing on the structural biology of protein complexes. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Physical Biology, University of South Bohemia (2002–2003), he was appointed group leader of the Department of Structure and Function of Proteins at the Institute of Systems Biology and Ecology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, in 2004. Later that same year, he was promoted to head of the department

Since 2011, Dr. Ettrich had served as the director of the Center for Nanobiology and Structural Biology of the Academy of Sciences, a research center and campus he has built and shaped from the ground up in Nové Hrady, South Bohemia, over the past 14 years. In 2013, he was appointed full professor of biophysics at the University of South Bohemia.

Dr. Ettrich initiated and became the founding director of the Czech national distributed research infrastructure for Systems Biology, which has been a priority project on the national roadmap since 2014. This initiative fosters collaboration between the Academy of Sciences and major Czech universities.

As a pioneer in structural biology, Dr. Ettrich has provided groundbreaking insights into fundamental biological processes, integrating theoretical and experimental methods. His research focuses on the relationship between the structure and function of proteins, dynamic changes during functional processes, and interactions among cofactors and subunits in protein complexes. These studies are not only of fundamental scientific interest but also of significant medical relevance, addressing issues such as horizontal gene transfer, molecular origins of bone deformities, cancer-relevant gene mutations, ion channel signaling in the immune system, and other molecular targets for modulating cell functions.

Dr. Ettrich’s research has been continuously funded by national, European, and international grant agencies since 2001. His prolific output includes over 83 peer-reviewed articles, several book chapters, and hundreds of conference contributions, collectively cited more than 2,500 times. He has an impressive H-index of 31.

In recognition of his contributions, Dr. Ettrich received the Otto Wichterle Award in 2006, honoring outstanding young scientists, and was nominated as a Princeton Global Scholar by Princeton University’s Chemistry Department in 2010. In 2016, he was awarded a Senior Fulbright-Masaryk Scholarship, spending seven months (September 2016–April 2017) in South Florida as a visiting professor at NSU’s College of Osteopathic Medicine. There, he conducted research on “Skeletal Bone Deformity: PAPS-Synthase in Sulfur Metabolism and Related Dysplasia.”

Dr. Ettrich is fluent in Czech, German, and Slovak.