Albert-László Barabási

Albert-László Barabási is a Romanian-born Hungarian-American physicist, renowned for his pioneering contributions to network science. He earned his M.S. from Eötvös University, Budapest, and his Ph.D. from Boston University. Currently, he is Distinguished University Professor and Director of the Center for Network Science at Northeastern University. Since 2008, he has also served as a Visiting Professor at Central European University (CEU). As CEU’s Principal Investigator of the DYNASNET project (2019–2027), he divides his time between CEU and Northeastern. This ERC Synergy Grant—jointly carried out by CEU, the Rényi Institute (Budapest), and Charles University (Prague)—aims to foster a deeper interaction between network science and mathematical graph theory.

Professor Barabási’s theoretical and empirical work established the field of network science and has been instrumental in its spectacular development. Across disciplines ranging from physics to medicine and the social sciences, he has uncovered universal properties of networks underlying complex systems and demonstrated the power of the network-based approach in understanding them.

His achievements have earned him numerous prestigious honors, including the Gothenburg Lise Meitner Award (2024), the Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society (2023, “for pioneering work on the statistical physics of networks that transformed the study of complex systems, and for lasting contributions in communicating the significance of this rapidly developing field to a broad range of audiences”), the Bolyai Prize of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (2019), the Lagrange Prize (Italy, 2011), and the C&C Prize (NEC, Japan, 2008). He is an elected member of several academies, including the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2024), the Austrian Academy of Sciences (2024), the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (2004), Academia Europaea (2007), the European Academy of Sciences and Arts (2018), the Romanian Academy of Sciences (2018), and the Massachusetts Academy of Sciences (2013). He has also received honorary doctorates from Óbuda University (Hungary, 2023), the Technical University of Madrid (2011), Utrecht University (2018), and the West University of Timișoara (2020). 

In addition to his academic work, Professor Barabási is the author of several acclaimed books for general audiences, including The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success (2018), Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do (2010), and Linked: The New Science of Networks (2002). His textbook Network Science (2018) has become a standard reference in the field, and his books have been translated into more than twenty languages.