Ecological and Evolutionary Biology

More information about admission process for international applicants in general can be found here.

Date of the entrance exam
The applicants will receive information about the entrance exam via e-mail usually at least 7 days before the exam.
Please, always check your e-mails, including spam folders.

Conditions of admission
To be admitted, applicants must obtain a total of at least 120 points in the expert knowledge part and 60 points in the language part.
Successful applicants are informed of their acceptance via e-mail and subsequently receive an invitation to the enrolment.

Programme capacity
The capacity of a given programme is not fixed; students are admitted based on a decision by the Doctoral Board after assessing their aptitude for study and motivation.

The programme’s goal is to educate high-quality specialists in the fields of Botany, Ecology, Hydrobiology, Parasitology, and Zoology. Depending on the specialization and dissertation topic, the graduates of the programme are familiar with current and advanced working methods and knowledge particularly in the field of plant and animal taxonomy, biosystematics, ecology, palaeoecology, parasitology, hydrobiology, bioinformatics, biostatistics, molecular biology and genetics. They participate in scientific discussions in these and related fields. They are able to propose research topics in the field and plan research projects using adequate methods. They are able to write and publish scientific articles in international and national journals and present their results at international and national conferences.

Individual working groups of the Department of Botany and Zoology cover a broad range of research topics, in which doctoral students are trained within individual programme’s specializations, for example:

- Plant and animal diversity and its causes

- Taxonomy and phylogeny of selected taxa

- Palaeoecological studies in selected regions and time periods

- Invasions of non-native species and their impacts

- Macroecological patterns in plant and animal assemblages

- Impact of climatic change on populations, communities and ecosystems

- Variation in plant genome size

- Molecular, ecological, evolutionary and behavioural interactions in host-parasite systems

- Diversity and phylogeny of selected host groups

- Interspecific interactions, e.g. between predator and prey

- Life strategies of aquatic organisms

- Bioindication of the ecological status of aquatic habitats

Students are motivated by a high professional quality of the research in a friendly and collaborative environment. Performance of students is evaluated financially based on the Department’s and Faculty’s rules of students’ evaluation. Students are also motivated to participate at prestigious international conferences and to research visits in scientific institutions abroad.

Upon successful completion of the programme, the graduate is able to:

• formulate original scientific questions and research problems independently, propose appropriate approaches to address them, and solve them using suitable research methods;
• design scientific studies, apply both fundamental and specialized methodological approaches to the collection of biological data, and analyze the resulting data using appropriate statistical methods;
• publish the results of their original research in peer-reviewed journals and present them at national and international scientific conferences;
• apply acquired knowledge and research findings in both basic and applied research, as well as in addressing practical problems, for example in the field of nature conservation;
• critically analyze and evaluate the current state of knowledge and the latest scientific developments in the field of research;
• communicate effectively in academic English, both orally and in writing, including presenting research findings and engaging in scholarly discussion;
• share professional knowledge and expertise with members of the scientific community and collaborate effectively in interdisciplinary and international research teams;
• apply the knowledge and outcomes gained through international collaboration to the planning and implementation of their own research.