Jan Kuneš is a theoretical condensed matter physicist based at the Faculty of Science, Masaryk University, where he serves as an Associate Professor at the Department of Condensed Matter Physics (MUNI Award in Science and Humanities, MASH). He graduated from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, in 1997 and received his Ph.D. there in 2002.

From 1998 to 2002, he was a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He subsequently worked at the University of California, Davis (2002–2005), followed by a Humboldt Research Fellowship and later a research position at Universität Augsburg (2006–2009). Since 2010, he has been a senior researcher at the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Between 2016 and 2023, he conducted research at TU Wien.

His research focuses on condensed matter theory, electronic correlations, magnetism, photoemission theory, and optical spectroscopies, as well as numerical many-body methods. He is a co-author of more than 135 publications (including in journals such as Physical Review Letters and Nature Photonics), which have been cited more than 8,000 times.

He has received several distinctions, including the Bolzano Prize of Charles University (2002), the prestigious Humboldt Research Fellowship (2005), the Purkyně Fellowship (2008), and an ERC Consolidator Grant (2015).