Hungarian researcher given Austrian science award

This year’s 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 a 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.

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 several times as a guest
researcher. Illés 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 is awarded to researchers under
40 years of age in the fields of molecular biology, chemistry, or physics,
working in one of the countries that was part of the former Austro-Hungarian
Empire. Prior to Illés Farkas, three Hungarian scientists had received the
award: neurologist Zoltán Nusser, biologist Csaba Pál, and biochemist Mihály
Kovács.