Michal Lebl graduated of the The University of Chemical Technology, Prague Czech Republic (1974). He holds a PhD and DSc in organic chemistry from the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in Prague where he served as Head of the Department of Peptide Chemistry until 1991. Then he assumed the role as the Director of Chemistry in the startup Selectide Corporation in Tucson AZ, the first company founded to explore combinatorial chemistry for medicinal drug discovery. In 1995, he became senior director in the Department of Automation for Houghten Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (eventually renamed Trega Biosciences, Inc), an early competitor of Selectide. At Trega he invented the technique of tilted centrifugation. The technology was licensed exclusively to the Spyder Instruments, Inc. This company was formed in 1993 by Michal Lebl, Richard Houghten and Jutta Eichler. Spyder Instruments was merged, in 2000, with a new startup Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ: ILMN) where he worked until 2012 as the Senior Director of Automation. There his team built the largest oligonucleotide synthesizers in the world. Later he moved to Prague and returned to the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences as the director of The Development Center where he continued developing solutions for automated synthesis. In parallel he was running the Spyder Institute Praha dealing with custom synthesis of peptides.