Czechoslovak Society of Arts & Sciences (SVU)

George Tesar, Ph.D. (Wisconsin) is Professor Emeritus at Umea University (Sweden) and the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Previously he served as a Professor of Marketing and International Business at Umea University, a Professor of Marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, and an academic consultant.

Professor Tesar is an international consultant and senior marketing specialist to top management in high technology, automotive, and consumer product industries in North America and Europe. He assists smaller manufacturing and engineering firms in their efforts to enter the global marketplace through: strategic planning, research and analysis, product development, value chain building, and network participation. He has been involved with a number of new technology projects including development and market introduction of high technology components in the medical instruments and automobile industries.

Dr. Tesar has been active in North America and Europe as a management education and training specialist for a number of private firms and public institutions. He specializes in bridging managerial styles and practices between marketing and technical specialists in business-to-business type settings. He works closely with top management through one-on-one focused sessions, workshops, seminars, and ongoing internal assessment programs.

Dr. Tesar received his Ph.D., from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his MBA from Michigan State University after spending more than six years in industry as a manufacturing engineer working for a large global company. An internationally recognized strategist and educator, Dr. Tesar is responsible for a number of books including Strategic Technology Management, more than 30 published articles, over one hundred professional papers, and numerous studies. He was a Faculty Associate with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C., specializing in technology transfer issues, served as an external marketing specialist for the U.S. Department of Energy from 1976 to 1984, and was a co-founder and a Senior Partner of Euro-Link Associates in London from 1982 to 1988.

For over twenty years Dr. Tesar was a member of the Governor’s Advisory Committee on International Trade and later on the Wisconsin International Trade Council. He serves on boards, state and federal advisory committees, and is active in international professional associations. Dr. Tesar has also held academic positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Georgetown University. He also held visiting positions at the Czech Management Center, Celakovice, Czech Republic; Warsaw University of Economics (Fulbright Senior Lecturer); Aalborg University in Denmark; and the Helsinki School of Economics. From 1998 to 2003 he was appointed a Visiting Professor at the Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic. He frequently lectures in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and in European MBA programs on topics in marketing and on science and business management integration.

Professor Tesar was born in Czechoslovakia as an American citizen and came to Chicago in 1953 where he was active in many Czechoslovak organizations including the American Sokol. In the late 1950s he was a co-organizer of a small group of young Czechoslovaks in Chicago called Klub Svoboné Kultury with Mirek Zástera and others.

Professor Tesar resides in Madison, Wisconsin with his wife Catherine T. (Krno) Tesar.

Karel Pacak is Head of Section on Medical Neuroendocrinology at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health (NIH). He graduated with summa cum laude from Charles University. Prior to joining the NIH, he worked as a physician and research fellow at 1st Faculty of Medicine, Charles University and Institute of Endocrinology, Prague, Czech Republic. At 1st Faculty of Medicine, Charles University Karel obtained his internal medicine and endocrinology board certification in 1986 and 1999, respectively. Karel also received his Ph.D. in 1993 and D.Sc. in 1999, respectively from Charles University. In 1995, after 5 years in basic research at NIH, Karel started his residency in internal medicine at the Washington Hospital Center, USA. After Karel completed the residency program in 1997, he specialized in endocrinology, diabetes, and metabolism. Karel is board certified in both internal medicine and endocrinology & diabetes. Karel devotes a lot of time to teaching and education of young talented physicians as well as scientists. He is Professor of Medicine at Charles University, Prague as well as Georgetown University, DC. In 2005 he became the President of the 1st International Symposium on Pheochromocytoma. He published about 200 articles and 55 chapters related to endocrine tumors. He recieved numerous awards including ; J. C. CURTIN AWARD for excellence in teaching and research and THE MAIN PRIZE of the Surgeon General, the Ministry of Health of the Czech Republic. Both parents are from Czech Republic.

Dr. Cecilia Rokusek has had a 28-year career in higher education. During that time she has distinguished herself as an outstanding teacher, scholar, and administrator.

Born and raised in Tabor, South Dakota, she was able to maintain her Czech heritage. Throughout high school and college, Dr. Rokusek was active in the Czech Heritage Preservation Society in Tabor. She was also active in numerous Czech theatrical productions in the area.

After completing her Master’s degree at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln where she was a Regents Scholar, Dr. Rokusek started her academic career at her undergraduate alma mater, Mount Marty College in Yankton, South Dakota. During her six-year tenure there she served as an Assistant Professor and Chair of the Dietetics Program. In 1982 she joined the faculty at the University of South Dakota School of Medicine in the Department of Family Medicine. In 1983 she received her doctorate from the University of South Dakota in Adult and Higher Education Administration.

In 1987 she was appointed to a key administrative position in the School of Medicine where she served as the Executive Director for the Center for Developmental Disabilities and Assistant Vice President of Health Affairs. In 1993 she accepted a deanship at Governors State University in University Park, Illinois. She served as Dean of Health Professions and full professor there until 1999 when she moved to America’s newest state university in Fort Myers, Florida. She is now serving as Special Assistant to the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers. She continues to do nutrition-related research and is active on numerous federal grant initiatives in the area of gerontology and behavioral health. Dr. Rokusek was recently elected national chair of the Health Division for the American Association on Mental Retardation.

Dagmar White served for six terms as a vice president of the SVU Executive Board. Born in Prague, she came to the United States in 1948 after the Communist takeover of her country. During the Second World War she was interned with her mother and brother because her father was fighting with the Free Czechoslovak Forces Abroad.

She wears many hats in the field of music: soprano, director of opera, voice teacher, choral conductor, and musicologist.

She holds undergraduate degrees from the Juilliard School of Music and the University of Kansas, a master’s degree in Music Education from Columbia University, and a PhDr. from Charles University.

She taught at the National Conservatories in Bogota, Colombia; Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; and Managua, Nicaragua. She had an extensive career in opera, concert, radio, and television, and appeared as a soloist with symphony orchestras.

Dr. White is the founder and director of the Vienna Light Opera Company and a member of the music faculty of the Northern Virginia Community College. She also teaches in her private voice studio and has sponsored several singers in the Metropolitan Opera auditions. She is a tireless propagator of Czech music. With the Vienna Light Opera Company, she produced and directed two productions of Smetana’s “The Bartered Bride,” the first one in 1986 and the second one in 1998, which was subsidized by a grant from the Czech Government. She sang leading roles in American premiers of Smetana’s “Two Widows,” Dvorak’s “Peasant Rogue,” “Stubborn Lovers,” and “The Devil and Kate,” presented at The Kennedy Center. She is also coaching American singers in Czech diction and Czech vocal repertoire.

As a musicologist, she has done research for the Moravian Music Foundation on “The 1501 Bohemian Hymnal,” and actively participates as a lecturer during the SVU congresses. She has chaired musicological sessions during the past seven congresses. During the 18th World Congress in Brno in 1996, she was in charge of the academic program. She was president of the Washington, DC Chapter during 1985-88 and chairman of the local arrangements for the 14th World Congress. As a vice president, she is involved in cultural and social aspects of the Society and the organization of international conferences.

Eugene Gooden Martin, Ph.D. is a Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick. He currently serves as the Co-Director of more than a hundred laboratories offering rapid HIV testing in the State of New Jersey.

Graduating with a degree in History and Government from St. Lawrence University (Canton, NY) in 1969, Gene received a Master of Science and a Ph.D. in Cardiovascular Physiology from New York Medical College in 1981. After spending two years as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard Medical School with joint appointments in the Departments of Pathology and Anesthesia at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Shriners Burns Institute, he joined the Department of Pathology at Rutgers Medical School (now renamed UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School) in 1983 where he served as the Director of the Serology Laboratory, as the Chief of the Division of Informatics and as the departmental Vice-Chairman for 17 years. In addition, along with Dr. Karel Raska and Robert L. Trelstad, MD he co-founded the University Diagnostic Laboratories, a federation of clinical laboratories within the medical school. Over those years, he was the recipient of grants in two major domains: medical informatics and laboratory approaches to infectious disease.

He currently directs the Physician Assistant program in Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and is actively involved in the education of medical students, PA students and residents at the nation’s largest allied health university. In addition to his role in the SVU, Gene has served as the Secretary to the Board of the New Jersey Society of Blood Bank Professionals.

Dr. Martin was a participant in the 2006 SVU Congress in Ceské Budejovice and the 2008 SVU World Congress in Ruzomberok, Slovakia. At those meetings he has presented discussions of rapid HIV testing in the United States public health efforts. Gene has published several papers with Karel F. Raska, Jr., M.D., Ph.D. and Jana Raskova, M.D. on topics ranging from the immunology of HIV disease to the role of case-based learning in medical education.

He is married and resides in East Brunswick, NJ with his wife Nancy. Together, they have five children: two sons and three daughters. Gene is an avid skier and hiker.

Vera Borkovec was born in Czechoslovakia, but grew up in Teheran, Iran. She did her undergraduate work in English and Persian studies at Charles University in Prague. She came to the USA in 1952. She holds an M.A. in French from Hollins College (Virginia), and an M.A. in Russian from American University (Washington, DC). She received her Ph.D. in Russian from Georgetown University (Washington, DC).

After a teaching career of more than thirty years in the Department of Language and Foreign Studies at American University, where she taught Russian (sometimes Czech), language, linguistics, literature and drama, she retired as Professor Emerita and devotes herself to her lifelong interests and avocations: theatre, poetry, literary translation, and SVU. Having translated and published a number of stories by Arnost Lustig, she has turned to the translation of Czech and Russian plays, mainly the plays of Russia’s Aleksandr Volodin and the Czech playwright Josef Topol. She has published some of her translations of poems by Nobel prize winner Jaroslav Seifert and in 1998 her translated volume of poetry by Libuse Cacalova was published in the Czech Republic under the title KINGDOM OF PEBBLES.

She served for seven terms as SVU Vice President. In the eighties she served three terms as Vice President for Student Affairs, in 1994-2008 she was Vice President for Local Chapters.

Her interest in SVU began when she came to Washington in the early sixties. She became a regular member in 1965, attended all the Society’s Congresses, presenting papers, chairing and organizing sessions. She has served on several committees, such as the Student Committee, Bylaws Committee, and Membership Committee. In 1977 she was elected first woman Secretary General of the Society. She held this post three times:reelected in 1980 and once again in 1993-1994. In 1982-84 she was Chairman of the Washington, DC Chapter. Later as SVU Vice President she organized SVU’s younger generation into SVU Junior and instituted a yearly competition for the SVU Student Award, which has been one of the best ways of attracting young people’s interest in the Society.

She served as Local Arrangements Chairman for the 20th Anniversary World Congress which was held at American University in Washington, DC during the days of August 8-13, 2000. The fact that the Congress was held at her home university had immense advantages and ensured the success of the event. American University was not simply a venue, but the university became an active sponsor. She also arranged the staging of a play “Hour of Love” by Czech playwright Josef Topol, which she also translated into English, performed by the American University Department of Performing Arts. Vera Borkovec was also adviser to the production crew and sat in on rehearsals.

Her more recent publications include a bilingual anthology of exile poetry “The Taste of a Lost Homeland (2002)”, “Czech and Slovak Theatre Abroad” (2006), “The Voices of Birds and Other Plays by Josef Topol” (2007), and a translation of Libuse Cacalová’s poetry “The Upper Flow of Rivers” (2009). For her translations from the Czech she was awarded in 2003 the “Artis Bohemiae Amicis” medal by the Czech Minister of Culture.

ZPRÁVY SVU is a bi-montlhy printed newsletter
regularly distributed to SVU members since 1959.

2011

• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 53, No. 5, September-October 2011
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 53, No. 4, July-August 2011
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 53, No. 3, May-June 2011

2008

• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 50, No. 6, November-December 2008
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 50, No. 1, January-February 2008

2007

• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 49, No. 6, November-December 2007
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 49, No. 5, September-October 2007
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 49, No. 4, July-August 2007

2006

• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 48, No. 6, November-December 2006
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 48, No. 5, September-October 2006
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 48, No. 4, July-August 2006
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 48, No. 3, May-June 2006
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 48, No. 2, March-April 2006
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 48, No. 1, January-February 2006

2005

• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 47, No. 6, November-December 2005
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 47, No. 5, September-October 2005
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 47, No. 4, July-August 2005
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 47, No. 3, May-June 2005
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 47, No. 2, March-April 2005
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 47, No. 1, January-February 2005

2004

• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 46, No. 6, November-December 2004
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 46, No. 5, September-October 2004
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 46, No. 4, July-August 2004
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 46, No. 3, May-June 2004
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 46, No. 2, March-April 2004
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 46, No. 1, January-February 2004

2003

• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 45, No. 6, November-December 2003
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 45, No. 5, September-October 2003
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 45, No. 4, July-August 2003
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 45, No. 3, May-June 2003
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 45, No. 2, March-April 2003
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 45, No. 1, January-February 2003

2002

• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 44, No. 6, November-December 2002
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 44, No. 5, September-October 2002
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 44, No. 4, July-August 2002
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 44, No. 3, May-June 2002
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 44, No. 2, March-April 2002
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 44, No. 1, January-February 2002

2001

• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 43, No. 6, November-December 2001
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 43, No. 5, September-October 2001
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 43, No. 4, July-August 2001
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 43, No. 3, May-June 2001
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 43, No. 2, March-April 2001
• ZPRÁVY SVU, Vol. 43, No. 1, January-February 2001

Petr Vaníček, Ph.D., Dr.Sc, P.Eng. (NB.), is Professor Emeritus of geodesy in the Department of Geodesy and Geomatics Engineering at University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, NB., Canada. He retired in 1999, after 28 years of teaching and is now involved only in post-graduate student supervision and in research. His research interests cover the whole spectrum of geodesy, some geophysics and applied mathematics. He is a fellow of American Geophysical Union (AGU), of International Association of Geodesy (IAG) and of the Czechoslovak Society for Arts and Sciences (SVU); he is also Senior Distinguished Scientist Humboldt awardee (1989), and recipient of Canadian Geophysical Union’s 1996 Tuzo J. Wilson medal, the highest Canadian geophysical honour. He is author and co-author of over 400 publications including a comprehensive textbook “Geodesy: the concepts”. This textbook has been translated into several languages and is being used for teaching geodesy all over the world.

Petr Vaníček, was born in 1935 in Sušice, a town of 8,000 inhabitants in south-western Bohemia to father Ivan, who was an architect and mother Irena, nee Blahovcová, who was a housewife – a typical bourgeois family. After the communist takeover he was dismissed first from the French Lycée he was attending and then from the regular high school as a bourgeois element; he eventually finished his secondary education at the Community College of Surveying (Vyšší průmyslová škola zeměměřičská) in Prague in 1954. He graduated from Czech Institute of Technology (ČVUT) in Prague in 1959 with an Engineering Diploma in Surveying (Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Emil Buchar); Faculty of Surveying was the only one willing to accept him in spite of his questionable political profile. After graduation, he served one year in Czechoslovak Army, and after the military service was employed until 1963 as a field surveyor in the Cadastral Office in Nové Strašecí. He married Jana Vančurová in 1960 and they have had together three children, Filip, Štěpán, and Anna, born in 1961, 1962, and 1970, respectively. His hobbies during his student’s years were sports, bridge and painting.

In 1963 Petr Vaníček changed jobs: through a family acquaintance of an influential professor, he was accepted as a scientific employee in Mathematical Laboratory of ČVUT Faculty of Technical and Nuclear Physics (FTJF). There he worked for 4 years as computer programmer and numerical analyst. While employed by FTJF, he was accepted as an external Ph.D. candidate by Institute of Geophysics of Czechoslovak Academy of Science (Supervisor: Dr. Jan Pícha). In May of 1967 he left Czechoslovakia for the UK, where he was offered Senior Research Fellowship by Natural Environmental Research Council of Great Britain tenable at Tidal Institute of the University of Liverpool (Supervisor: Mr. Geoff Lennon). One year later, just before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, he traveled back to Prague to defend (summa cum laude) his Ph.D. in mathematical physics. The topic of his Ph.D. research was “least-squeares spectral analysis”. His wife and two sons were permitted to join him in UK, during the Prague Spring. At about the same time, the Tidal Institute was taken over by UK Government and Petr became a Senior Scientific Officer of British civil service.

In September 1969 the whole family Vaníček left Europe to become Canadian immigrants. Petr was accepted as National Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow, a position tenable at Surveys and Mapping Branch of Department of Energy, Mines and Resources in Ottawa. He held this post for two years, before he assumed a tenure-track position of Associate Professor of geodesy at the Department of Surveying Engineering of University of New Brunswick (UNB) in Fredericton, NB., where he has been more or less continuously ever since. In 1974, Petr and his family became citizens of Canada, in 1976 he became full professor at UNB, and in 1983 he became Professional Engineer (P.Eng.) in the province of New Brunswick. He was president of Canadian Geophysical Union between 1986 and 1988.

Petr spent five months in 1978 as U.S. Academy of Science Senior Visiting Scientist at National Geodetic Survey, Rockville, Maryland and for several summers between 1975 and 2003 held various other visiting positions at Universities of Parana (Brazil), Sao Paulo (Brazil), Stuttgart (Germany), US National Centre for Earthquake Research (USGS), Menlo Park, Ca. (USA), Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (Sweden), K.N.Toosi University of Technology (Tehran, Iran), South African Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (Johannesburg), Curtin University of Technology, Perth (West Australia). Between July 1981 and June 1983, he held full professorship at the University of Toronto in Survey Science, Physics and Civil Engineering. Thereafter, until 1989, he remained Adjunct Professor of Survey Science there. Between 1982 and 1985 he was member of US NRC/Academy of Sciences Committee on Geodesy, Washington, between 1990 and 2000 he was member of international editorial board of Studia Geophysica et Geodetica, a journal of Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague and during the years of 1992 – 95 he was Editor-in-Chief of Manuscripta Geodaetica and Bulletin Géodésique, the international journals of IAG. He also held different functions within IAG and AGU.

In 1990, the Vaníček family returned to Czechoslovakia for the first time since 1968. In 1991 Petr married Valeria, nee Vašaryová, and in1993 had another degree bestowed on him, Dr. Sc. in mathematical physics, by the Academy of Science of the Czech Republic for his geodesy textbook. After retiring from UNB in 1999 Petr was made Honorary Research Professor and in 2002 Professor Emeritus. He still lives in Fredericton, co-supervises some graduate students, write papers and lectures in different parts of the world. Also, he is now able to devote more time to his hobbies, which include: five grandchildren, tennis, golf, downhill skiing, bridge, travelling, hunting and investing.

| SVU Members’ Biosketches |

Although the Society takes pride as having in its midst many outstanding intellectuals and professionals, the Society is no elitist group. It is a democratic and open society that admits anyone who subscribes to its aims.

Miloslav Rechcigl, Jr. is one of the founders and past President of many years of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU). He is a native of Mladá Boleslav, Czechoslovakia, who has lived in the US since 1950. After receiving a scholarship, he went to Cornell University where he studied from 1951-58, receiving his B.S., M.N.S., and Ph.D. degrees there, specializing in biochemistry, nutrition, physiology, and food science.

He then spent two years conducting research at the National Institutes of Health as a postdoctoral research fellow. Subsequently he was appointed to the staff of the Laboratory of Biochemistry at the National Cancer Institute. During 1968-69 he was selected for one year of training in a special USPHS executive program in research management, grants administration, and science policy. This led to his appointment as Special Assistant for Nutrition and Health in the Health Services and Mental Health Administration. In 1970 he joined the Agency for International Development as Nutrition Advisor and soon after was promoted to the position of Chief of Research and Institutional Grants Division. Later he became a Director with the responsibility for reviewing, administering and managing AID research.

He is the author or editor of over thirty books and handbooks in the field of biochemistry, physiology, nutrition, food science and technology, agriculture, and international development, in addition to a large number of scientific articles and book chapters.

Apart from his purely scientific endeavors as a researcher and science administrator, Dr. Rechcigl devoted almost 50 years of his life to the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU). In 1960-62 he served as secretary of the SVU Washington D.C. Chapter. He was responsible for the first two Society’s World Congresses, both of which were a great success and which put the Society on the world map. He also edited the Congress lectures and arranged for their publication, under the title The Czechoslovak Contribution to World Culture (1964, 682 p.) and Czechoslovakia Past and Present (1968, 2 volumes, 1900 p.). The publications received acclaim in the American academic circles and greatly contributed to the growing prestige of the Society worldwide.

Dr. Rechcigl was also involved, one way or another, with most of the subsequent SVU World Congresses, including the recent SVU Congresses in Prague, Brno, Bratislava, Washington, Plzen and Olomouc. Prior to his last term as the SVU President (2004-06), he held similar posts during 1974-76, 1976-78, and again in 1994-96, 1996-98, 1998-2000, 2000-02. 2002-04).In 1999, in conjunction with President Havel’s visit to Minnesota, he organized a memorable conference at the University of Minnesota on “Czech and Slovak America: Quo Vadis?”

Together with his wife Eva, he published eight editions of the SVU Biographical Directory, the last of which was printed in Prague in 2003. He was instrumental in launching a new English periodical Kosmas – Czechoslovak and Central European Journal. It was his idea to establish the SVU Research Institute and to create the SVU Commission for Cooperation with Czechoslovakia, and its Successor States, which played an important role in the first years after the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Under the sponsorship of the Research Institute he and his colleagues conducted a series of seminars about research management and the art of “grantsmanship” for scientists and scholars, as well as for the administrators, and science policy makers, at Czech and Slovak universities, the Academies of Sciences and the Government.

He was also instrumental in establishing the National Heritage Commission with the aim of preserving Czech and Slovak cultural heritage in America. Under its aegis, he has undertaken a comprehensive survey of Czech-related historic sites and archival materials in the US. Based on this survey, he has prepared a detailed listing, Czech-American Historic Sites, Monuments, and Memorials which was published through the courtesy of Palacky University in Olomouc (2004). The second part of the survey, bearing the title Czechoslovak American Archivalia, was also published by Palacky University (2004).

In this connection, he also organized several important conferences, one in Texas in 1997, the second in Minnesota (1999), the third in Nebraska (2001) and another in Iowa (2003). Most recently, through his initiative, a special “Working Conference on Czech & Slovak American Materials and their Preservation” was held at the Czech and Slovak Embassies in Washington, DC in November 2003. It was an exceptionally successful conference which led to the establishment of the new Czech & Slovak American Archival Consortium (CSAAC). Most recently, he also organized, jointly with the ACSCC of North Miami, a conference on “Czech and Slovak Heritage on Both Sides of the Atlantic”, 17-20 March 2005. The conference was co-sponsored by the US Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad, under the aegis of both Presidents of the Czech and Slovak Republics.

Among historians, Dr. Rechcigl is well known for his studies on history, genealogy, and bibliography of American Czechs and Slovaks. A number of his publications deal with the early immigrants from the Czechlands and Slovakia, including the migration of Moravian Brethren to America. In the last few years he has been working on the cultural contributions of American Czechs and Slovaks. A selection of his biographical portraits of prominent Czech-Americans from the 17th century to date has been published in Prague, under the title Postavy nasí Ameriky (Personalities of our America) (2000; 350 p.). On the occasion of his 75th birthday, SVU published a collection of his essays, under the title Czechs and Slovaks in America.