To be a traditional medical school with a tradition spanning for over almost 700 years is a privilege but also an obligation. To us, history means tradition, experience, and roots. These factors are important for moving ahead, evolving, and having the courage not to live from the past but be firmly anchored in the present and open to future developments. Our aim is to build on the legacy or earlier generations which kept the faculty at the forefront of development in medical education and scientific research.

This nowadays requires up-to-date but also very expensive equipment, which our faculty, thanks to the amazing enthusiasm of many dedicated people, from teachers and lecturers all the way to heads of research groups and administrative workers at the Dean’s Office, manages to keep not only operational but also updated. Thanks to these efforts, we may be old but we are no historical exhibit. Our faculty is modern and contributes to new trends and directions of development.

It is a great bonus for our students that they experience the preclinical, mainly theoretical part of their education in the historic buildings of the faculty, but in modern laboratories, autopsy halls, and other teaching facilities. They receive very modern instruction in the unique Centre of Medical Simulations, located in the building of the Institute of Physiology of the Faculty of Medicine. The faculty has at its disposal also numerous other simulators at various other departments and institutes, including simulators for venepuncture, catheterisation of urinary tract, or laparoscopic operations, while at the stomatology clinic, teaching aids include phantoms.

Scientific workers, postgraduate biomedicine students, but even pre-graduate students with interest in science can work on their research not only in our well-equipped laboratories but also at leading centres and specialised institutes, many of which have facilities that bear comparison with the best in the world.

One of such institutions is CAPI – Centre of Advanced Preclinical Imaging, which belongs to best-equipped such centres anywhere. In addition to a comprehensive array of ‘traditional’ imaging methods for in vivo research using small animals, it also has an MPI, i.e. magnetic particle imaging machine.

Other well-equipped institutes of our faculty include the Imaging Centre for Biomedicine and Medical Nanotechnologies (which focuses especially on electron microscopy) at the Purkyně Institute, and the National Centre of Medical Genomics, where our faculty functions as its national coordinator.

Thanks to our faculty’s important participation in the BIOCEV Centre of Excellence, our scientists have access to several service centres with top facilities, ranging from Imaging Methods to the Centre of Molecular Structure, all the way to OMICS Genomics and OMICS Proteomics.

We expect that the Albertov Campus project, which is currently in preparation, should further improve not only access to the most advanced technological equipment but also foster closer collaboration between outstanding scientists from various fields. Our faculty collaborates on this project with the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics and the Faculty of Science of the Charles University and it is expected that the new campus should welcome the first scientists and students already in 2026.