Přístupnostní navigace
E-application
Search Search Close
Student awards for young people who are changing the world around them—that is the mission of the Jan Opletal Awards, presented by the Student Chamber of the Council of Higher Education Institutions. This year, one of the three categories was won by Veronika Kamenská, a graduate of Brno University of Technology, who is behind the idea of the mobile app Nepanikař (“Don’t Panic”), which helps people with mental health issues. Today, Veronika is a doctoral student at Masaryk University, which nominated her for the award.
Veronika Kamenská with the Jan Opletal Award | Photo: Jan Opletal Award 2025
At the ceremonial evening of the Jan Opletal Awards on Tuesday, 11 November, Veronika Kamenská’s name was announced during the recognition of the Personalities Under 30 category. Host Michael Rozsypal welcomed her on stage and expressed admiration for the app’s user statistics: “Nepanikař has been downloaded by more than 850,000 users so far, and every day it is used by around 500 people experiencing suicidal thoughts and over 1,000 people suffering from anxiety,” he said, asking her about the amount of work behind these numbers.
The Jan Opletal Awards are named after a student of the Charles University Faculty of Medicine who was fatally injured during an anti-Nazi demonstration in 1939. The awards go to secondary school and university students and recent graduates for their work during their studies, for student and civic engagement, volunteerism, and other socially beneficial activities. Alongside Veronika Kamenská, this year’s winners include Anna Julie Wittmannová from the Hejčín Grammar School in Olomouc in the Secondary Schools category and Martin Pisarčik from the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague in the Universities category. We congratulate all the awardees!
The 2025 laureates at the award ceremony | Photo: Jan Opletal Award 2025
Veronika came up with the idea during her biomedical engineering studies at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Communication at Brno University of Technology (BUT). “During one lecture, having previously experienced mental illness myself, I wondered whether anyone had already created an app that could help people with these issues in Czech,” she says.
She then asked her friends—computer science students Aleš Řezáč and Tomáš Chlubna from the BUT Faculty of Information Technology—for programming help, and the rest is history.
About two months later, the first prototype was released. The developers consulted it with people living with mental illness, as well as psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychotherapists. After receiving their approval, they launched Nepanikař to the public. Its success was supported by recommendations from crisis hotlines and psychologists, as well as the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which placed enormous strain on mental health, leading to increased downloads of the app.
Nepanikař is a free tool. “It’s basically a digital ‘last-resort box’ that you can download to your phone without any registration. The user finds a guide to the five most common types of mental illness. After clicking on one category, they can access techniques, exercises, and also contacts for professional help,” explains Veronika. She adds that the project is no longer just a mobile app. Together with 140 collaborators—mostly volunteer students of psychology, social work, and other helping professions—they also run a chat and email crisis line, as well as counselling and awareness-raising activities. “The main message of our work is that mental illness should not be taboo and people should not be afraid to ask for help.”
Veronika Kamenská and the Nepanikař app have previously earned numerous awards—including the Werner von Siemens Award for overcoming obstacles during studies, the UN Award in Czechia for contributing to sustainable development goals, the Ministry of Education Award for extraordinary student achievements, and the Gratias Tibi 2020 award for civic engagement.
We congratulate Veronika Kamenská and wish her much success in her future socially beneficial activities!
Veronika Kamenská – Jan Opletal Awards (recipient profile)Recording of the Jan Opletal Awards 2025 on Czech Television’s iVysílání
Responsibility: Bc. Tereza Kučerová