Early career

I received my M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics in 2008, with my thesis earning the “Excellent Thesis Work” Prize of ABB Hungary and the first prize of the Thesis Contest of the Hungarian Electrotechnical Association. I conducted my studies as a Ph.D. student under the supervision of Prof. András Dán and joined the lecturing activities of the Department of Electric Power Engineering at the same time. Prof. Dán provided guidance to me to become an independent, initiator member of the Department. I also found joy and challenge in the supervision of graduate students early in my career, which enthusiasm has not declined ever since.

After obtaining my Ph.D. degree in 2013, I was invited by Prof. Szabina Török to join the newly founded Centre for Energy Research (CER) of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences as a research fellow. The Centre was established in January 2012, from two former independent institutions (the Atomic Energy Research Institute and the Institute of Isotopes), and my primary task was to manage and broaden the existing human resources in the topics of renewable energy, sustainable development and modelling and simulation of energy systems. In the course of our work, I sought to encompass the full spectrum of these scales, leading projects focusing on national, regional and institutional levels. A significant part of these projects was funded by the private and/or the public sector. In some cases, this funding facilitated the extension of ongoing basic research in the direction of application, and in other cases, it required dominantly methodological research that focused on the selected field from a theoretical perspective. Besides publishing our results in high prestige journals, large emphasis was put on national dissemination as well, supporting the newly established Centre to receive more attention.

As a research fellow of the Centre, I was invited in 2015 for a 6-month stay to the Karlsruher Insitut für Technologie, where I joined the institute of Prof. Veit Hagenmeyer, and worked on the EnergyLab 2.0 project. These early undertakings served as an organic antecedent to the Centre winning a ~ € 1 540k grant to establish a ‘Strategic workshop for the technological challenges in renewable energy systems’ in 2017. The grant allowed me to form the ‘Energy System Modelling Group’, an interdisciplinary team of scholars of various scientific backgrounds (electrical and energy engineering, architecture, meteorology, mathematics). The group is active in the focus areas of power and heat energy systems, building and city energy, energy meteorology and climate and energy statistics. As of 2023, the group is organized under the name ‘E-SEE (Energy Strategy and Environmental Effects)’.

Advanced career

At the same time, I successfully applied for the ‘Excellent Research Group Grant’ of the New National Excellence Programme in 2017 (~ € 38k), which provided the opportunity to form the ‘FASTER (Future Applications of Sustainable Transmission and distribution Energy Research) Research Group’ at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. The group focused on the static and dynamic examination of electricity transmission and distribution systems, integration of renewable energy sources and energy storage systems into the electricity infrastructure, smart grids, the topological examination of the electricity systems, machine learning, sustainability, multi-energy systems, and network modelling. Performance and personnel extension of the group in the first two years contributed to a successful application for the ‘Lendület Research Grant’ of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (~ € 400k); between 2019-2022, the group was officially named as the ‘MTA-BME Lendület FASTER Research Group’.

I undertook various tasks in scientific societies, most importantly leading the Student Association of Energy between 2008–2010, serving as a board member of the Hungarian Electrotechnical Association between 2013–2019, and being the chair of IEEE PES Hungary Chapter between 2019-2021. I was selected to be a member of the Academy of Young Researchers, Hungary in 2020 with a 5-year mandate.