Since 2011 he has been the director of the Center for Nanobiology and Structural Biology of the Academy of Sciences, a research center and campus he has built up and shaped from ground in Nove Hrady, South Bohemia, for the last 14 years. In 2013 he was appointed full professor in biophysics at the University of South Bohemia.

Dr. Ettrich initiated and was the founding director of the Czech national distributed research infrastructure for Systems Biology, since 2014 a priority infrastructure project on the national roadmap that builds on close collaboration between the Academy of Sciences and several major universities in the Czech Republic.

Dr. Ettrich is a pioneer in providing structural insight on very fundamental processes in living organism, using a synthesis of theoretical and experimental methods to gain key insights into the relationship between structure and function of proteins, dynamic changes related to functional processes on the level of proteins, and the mutual interaction of cofactors and subunits in protein complexes. His research is not only of fundamental interest but also of high medical relevance addressing issues like horizontal gene transfer, molecular origin of bone deformity, disease or cancer relevant gene mutations,ion channel signaling in immune system or other molecular targets to modulate cell function. His scientific work has received uninterrupted funding by national, European and international grant agencies since 2001 and is well documented in more than 77 peer reviewed articles, several book chapters, and numerous conference contributions that so far have been more than 1700 times cited by the scientific community.

In 2006 he received the Otto Wichterle Award, an honor given by the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic to selected, exceptionally outstanding young scientists for their remarkable contributions to the advancement of scientific knowledge and in 2010 he was nominated by the Chemistry Department at Princeton University as a Princeton Global Scholar. In 2016 he was awarded a Senior Fulbright-Masaryk Scholarship and was spending 7 months (Sept 2016 -April2017) in South Florida as a senior Fulbright-Masaryk Scholar and visiting professor at NSU’s College of Osteopathic Medicine working on “Skeletal Bone Deformity: PAPS-Synthase in Sulfur Metabolism and Related Dysplasia”.

Dr. Ettrich is proficient in the Czech, German and Slovak languages.