MTA researcher in physics receives a prestigious international award
The Ignaz Lieben Award of the Austrian Academy of Sciences has been given to Illés Farkas, a researcher from the Statistical and Biological Physics Group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The physicist received the acknowledgment and prize money of USD 36,000 for his achievements in the fields of collective motion phenomena, such as pedestrian escape panic and molecular biological and social networks.
3 March, 2017
Illés Farkas graduated in physics from the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in 2000. He received his PhD degree under the mentorship of Tamás Vicsek, academician at the ELTE Doctoral School of Physics, in 2004. He became a Doctor of the MTA in 2016.
The physicist has been a Hungarian Academy of Sciences researcher since 2003, throughout which time he has visited Germany, the United States, and China as a guest researcher several times. Mr Farkas participates in a number of OTKA and other research projects as a senior researcher and member. His fields of research include the study of the collective motion of humans, spectral graph theory, the clustering of networks and protein-protein interaction, transcription and translation networks. He plays a fundamental role in the compilation and maintenance of several basic pieces of research software and web servers. Currently, he teaches the Python programming language to students of physics at ELTE.
The Ignaz Lieben Award provides the largest amount of prize money offered by the Austrian Academy of Sciences and is received by one person each year. It can be awarded to under forty researchers in the fields of molecular biology, chemistry, or physics, working in one of the countries that was part of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. Before Illés Farkas, three Hungarian scientists had received the award: neurologist Zoltán Nusser, biologist Csaba Pál, and biochemist Mihály Kovács.