Nobel laureates and renowned foreign researchers at the Academy’s General Assembly: Videos of all the presentations from the AHAA-AMAT conference
Katalin Karikó, May-Britt Moser, Edward Moser, Aaron Ciechanover and László Lovász, former President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, also participated in the two-day bicentennial conference of the Association of Hungarian American Academicians (AHAA-AMAT) in the renovated headquarters of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, which is 200 years old this year. In addition to the Nobel and Abel Prize-winning researchers, presentations were given by renowned Hungarian scientists working and teaching at foreign universities, such as János Sztipanovics, Gyöngyi Szabó, Pál Maliga, Éva Tardos, György Buzsáki and Albert-László Barabási. You can watch the recordings of the lectures within this article.
The Association of Hungarian American Academicians and the external membership of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences organised a two-day bicentenary conference on the occasion of the 199th General Assembly of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences on 8 and 9 May.
Recordings of the presentations are available in the seven-part playlist below.
Katalin Karikó Photo: mta.hu / Tamás SzigetiThursday featured May-Britt Moser’s presentation “Spatial maps in entorhinal cortex and their origin” and Aaron Ciechanover’s talk titled “The revolution of personalized medicine – are we going to cure all diseases and at what price?” On Friday, Katalin Karikó presented her talk “Developing mRNA for therapy: my journey”, as did Edvard Moser with his presentation “Population dynamics of grid cells and place cells – from space to time”.
May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser shared the Nobel Prize in 2014 with John O’Keefe for their discovery of brain’s inner GPS, and Aaron Ciechanover was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2004 with his teacher, Hungarian-born biochemist Avram Hershko, and Irwin Rose of the United States, for their discovery of the mechanisms of protein degradation and recycling in cells. Katalin Karikó, together with Drew Weissman, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2023 for the development of an effective mRNA-based vaccine against COVID-19, a novel coronavirus disease.
László Lovász, Research Professor at the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics, was awarded the Abel Prize – often regarded as the Nobel Prize of Mathematics – in 2021, together with Avi Wigderson, for his work in theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics. On Thursday, 8 May, the former President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences gave his plenary talk titled “Discrete or Continuous Mathematics?”
Presentation by May-Britt Moser Photo: mta.hu / Tamás SzigetiBut they are not the only reason to watch the conference recordings. In addition to Nobel and Abel Prize-winning researchers, the conference also featured talks by renowned Hungarian scientists working and teaching at universities abroad, such as János Sztipanovics, Gyöngyi Szabó, Pál Maliga, Éva Tardos, György Buzsáki and Albert-László Barabási.
We previously published an interview with János Sztipanovics (in Hungarian), a founding institute professor at Vanderbilt University, on mta.hu, and soon you will be able to read our interview with Éva Tardos, professor of mathematics at Cornell University, as well as a summary of Katalin Karikó’s lecture.
Founded in 2015, AHAA-AMAT initially held its annual spring meetings in New York and Washington D.C., but the COVID pandemic interrupted this series. To mark the 200th anniversary of the founding of the Academy, the organisers invited external members of the Academy to Budapest to participate in the relaunched scientific forum. The external membership of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences is made up of researchers who consider themselves Hungarian or who speak Hungarian, work on Hungarian-related topics, but live and carry out their scientific activities abroad. They are researchers who pursue their fields of research to an internationally outstanding standard, while maintaining close links to the Hungarian scientific community.