Martin Friak works at the Institute of Physics of Materials, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, in Brno, Czech Republic. He received his PhD at the Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, in 2002, worked at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin, Germany (2002-2005), and then led his own group at the Max Planck Institute for Iron Research in Duesseldorf, Germany. (2005-2013). His research activities are focused on the development and applications of theoretical approaches allowing scale-bridging simulations of materials properties. Employing them, a theory-guided design of materials is performed. Due to the complex multi-scale nature of most of the studied problems, the applied strategies are intrinsically multi-disciplinary and multi-methodological (quantum-mechanical, atomistic, continuum).