PhD, DSc

Igor Lacík, PhD, DSc. (Research Professor) is the senior researcher at the Polymer Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, Slovakia. He served as a director of the Polymer Institute SAS (2010 – 2018) and currently he is the Head of Department for Biomaterials Research at this institute.

 

Igor Lacík received the MSc in polymer engineering in 1986 at the Slovak Technical University, PhD in 1993 and DSc in 2009, both in macromolecular chemistry, at the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava. His long-term research stays include the Sydney University, Australia (kinetics and mechanism of emulsion polymerization, with Prof. Bob Gilbert), the Institute Charles Sadron CNRS Strasbourg, France (synthesis and characterization of thickeners based on water-soluble copolymers, with Dr. Françoise Candau), the Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN, USA (islet encapsulation, with Prof. Taylor Wang), and the Georg-August University in Goettingen, Germany (kinetics and mechanism of radical polymerization, with Prof. Michael Buback).

 

The expertise of Igor Lacík covers several fields in the macromolecular chemistry. Particularly he focuses on polymeric materials and encapsulation processes towards development of hydrogel microcapsules for immunoprotection of transplanted islets of Langerhans in diabetes treatment to bring this therapy close to the clinics. His laboratory is recognized as the key center for characterization of polymers used for cell encapsulation as well as for characterization of physico-chemical properties of microcapsules. The kinetics and mechanism of radical polymerization in aqueous solutions represents another of his major expertise. He published over 120 publications on these topics.