Professor Galusek’s team is working on tackling one of the biggest practical challenges in glass recycling by developing a technology capable of sorting glass by its chemical composition while performing a thousand analyses per minute.
Professor Dušan Galusek is the director of the FunGlass centre at Alexander Dubček University of Trenčín, Europe’s largest academic glass research centre. Today, it is staffed by more than 120 researchers and PhD students from over 20 countries. The centre has joint PhD supervision agreements with six universities abroad, allowing doctoral students to earn degrees from both institutions. This is just one of the reasons why demand for positions at the centre is several times greater than the number of available openings.
The range of the team’s research topics has grown as well. Among others, researchers at FunGlass are developing a technology capable of sorting waste glass directly according to its chemical composition rather than merely by colour, as is the case with conventional recycling lines. This challenge has long complicated the production of new glass. A similar principle could in time help with the recycling of medical borosilicate glass such as vials and syringes. These are now currently hardly recycled at all because the pharmaceutical industry must comply with exceptionally strict standards for the glass it uses. The team has also developed an entirely new type of reference material for the chemical analysis of rocks with high lithium or uranium content. There is strong market demand for such a material, which is currently pending a patent. In each of these projects, FunGlass is not just one partner among many. The centre’s reputation now drives receiving invitations to join international consortia.
Professor Galusek actively engages in his colleagues’ projects, but his own recent research has focused primarily on two entirely new areas. The first involves so-called high-entropy oxides – multicomponent materials that would normally separate into multiple phases, but in certain disordered compositions can form a single stable phase. While this concept has mostly been investigated in metallic alloys, Galusek says that relatively few researchers have so far explored it in oxides. He sees considerable potential both for basic research and for practical applications, such as thermal barrier coatings for turbines that could improve their efficiency or in extremely temperature-resistant materials such as those required for spacecraft heat shields. This research secured his team an invitation to join a consortium preparing a European project under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Networks programme. The proposal is due to be submitted in November 2026.
His second research area is the preparation of bioactive glasses using a process known as cold sintering. Conventional sintering, which is necessary to manufacture porous bone implants, takes place at high temperatures. At these temperatures, glass partially crystallises and loses some of its therapeutic properties. Galusek was inspired by the work of an American colleague in the field of ceramics, who discovered that a similar process for sintering ceramic particles can take place at much lower temperatures – just a few hundred degrees rather than the usual temperatures exceeding a thousand degrees – when water or aqueous solutions are added to the material. Professor Galusek’s team is now investigating whether the same principle can be applied to glass, with the aim of producing bioactive structures without compromising their bioactivity.
Professor Galusek’s path to science was an unconventional one. Before university, he had dreamed of studying archaeology. But after an offer of a PhD position at his alma mater, he studied inorganic chemistry at the Faculty of Chemical and Food Technology of the Slovak University of Technology. He initially became an expert in ceramics and only later turned to glass – now the central focus of his work – at the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. He also worked in Germany and the United Kingdom before finally returning to Trenčín, his hometown. There, in 2017, he founded FunGlass, the first centre of excellence in Slovakia established under the Horizon 2020 programme.
Looking ahead, he would like the centre to establish itself as an international leader in selected areas of research and to build genuinely effective cooperation with industrial companies and manufacturing. He considers this one of the most difficult goals to achieve in academia.
A native of Trenčín, Galusek still feels more at home in a smaller city close to nature, despite the years he spent abroad. When he is not doing research, he heads for the mountains – hiking, cycling, or skiing. That is when he switches his phone to airplane mode so that no one can disturb him.
