After graduating from the French Lycée A. Daudet in Nîmes, he graduated from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University in Prague (1973–1978). Subsequently, he started working as a programmer at the Poldi Kladno Steelworks (1978–1979) and then became a specialist at the Institute of Hydrodynamics of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (1979–1981). Since 1981 he has been a researcher at the Mathematical Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences (now the ASCR), where he also defended his dissertation in 1984 and in 2001–2003 he worked as the head of the Department of Evolutionary Differential Equations.
He has completed a number of scientific and lecture stays at foreign universities and research institutions, for example in the USA, France, Italy, Germany and China. From 1997 to 2000 and 2004 to 2009, he was a researcher at the Weierstrass Institute in Berlin, where since 2005 he has been the head of the research group "Thermodynamic modeling and phase transition analysis". He then took over the leadership of the Mathematical Institute of the ASCR in Prague for the period 2009–2014. Since 2017, he has been a member of the Academic Council of the ASCR, in which he represents the Vice-Chairman of the First Scientific Area in solving scientific and organizational issues of workplaces 1-3. section. In the Academic Council of the ASCR, he is mainly responsible for solving conceptual issues of scientific training and is responsible for the cooperation of the ASCR with universities and departmental workplaces, including joint workplaces.