Milos Novotny
Distinguished Professor Emeritus
(812) 855-8031
Chem C105A
Distinguished Professor Emeritus Milos V. Novotny was raised and educated in Brno (Czech Republic) and studied at Masaryk University where he received the degrees of Magister and Dr. Rer. Nat. degree in Biochemistry and a Dr. Sc. degree in Chemical Sciences. Before emigrating to Sweden 1968, and later to the U.S, he was on the research staff at the Institute of Analytical Chemistry at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in Brno. While working at the Royal Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, he accepted the Robert A. Welch Postdoctoral Fellowship at University of Houston (Texas) from 1969-1971. In 1971, he was appointed to the faculty of Indiana University (IU) where he rose through the ranks to a full professor, James H. Rudy Professor, Lilly Chemistry Alumni Chair, and Distinguished Professor.
At IU, Prof. Novotny established an internationally recognized research group which played a major role in developing modern chromatographic and electrophoretic methods. He was a pioneer in capillary GC and coupling it with mass spectrometry; later on, in capillary LC, supercritical fluid chromatography, and in the early developments of capillary electrophoresis. As a member of the NASA Viking 1975 Science Team, Prof. Novotny designed the miniaturized GC column to search for organic molecules on Mars. In the search for new LC microcolumns, miniaturized detectors, and capillary LC-MS methodologies, Prof. Novotny educated numerous students and research associates to become future leaders in academia and in top industrial positions. He received several awards at IU for his educational activities.
Prof. Novotny’s research accomplishments have been recognized by more than forty different awards, medals, and other distinctions from three different continents. Among the most prestigious are four awards from the American Chemical Society: Chromatography (1986); Chemical Instrumentation (1988); Separation Science and Technology (1992); and Analytical Chemistry (2005). He also received the Ralph N. Adams Award in Bioanalytical Chemistry (2008). He was named the R&D Magazine Scientist of the Year in 1994. His international awards include the Jaroslav Janák Medal and Award, Marcel J.E. Golay Award, and A.J.P. Martin Gold Medal (U. K.). Prof. Novotny received honorary doctorates from Uppsala University (Sweden) and Charles University in Prague. He was elected to two foreign academies: the Royal Society for Sciences (Sweden) and the Learned Society of Czech Republic. His research interests are wide-ranging, from separation science to structural analysis of biological molecules, to proteomics and glycoscience, to chemical communication in mammals. He and his coworkers have been credited with structural identification of the first mammalian pheromones. He has co-authored over 540 articles, reviews, and patents which are widely cited (2024 h-index 103).