Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

Albert-László Barabási is the Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science and a Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University, where he directs the Center for Complex Network Research. He holds appointments in the Departments of Physics and Computer Science at Northeastern University as well as in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women Hospital, and he is a visiting professor at the Department of Network and Data Science at Central European University in Budapest. A Hungarian born native of Transylvania, Romania, he received his Master’s in Theoretical Physics at the Eotvos University in Budapest, Hungary and was awarded a Ph.D. three years later at Boston University. Barabási is the author several general audience books, like “The Formula: The Science of Success (2018)” "Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do" (2010), "Linked: The New Science of Networks" (2002) and of the textbooks Network Science (2020) and the monograph Science of Science (coathored with Dashun Wang).  

Barabasi's work lead to the discovery of scale-free networks in 1999 and proposed the Barabási-Albert model to explain their widespread emergence in natural, technological and social systems, from the cellular telephone to the WWW or online communities.  

Barabási is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the recipient of the 2023 Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of APS. He was awarded the FEBS Anniversary Prize for Systems Biology in 2005 and the John von Neumann Medal by the John von Neumann Computer Society from Hungary, for outstanding achievements in computer-related science and technology in 2006. He has been elected into the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (2004) and the Academia Europaea (2007). He received the C&C Prize from the NEC C&C Foundation in 2008. In 2009 the US National Academies of Sciences awarded him the 2009 Cozzarelli Prize. In 2011 Barabási was awarded the Lagrange Prize-CRT Foundation for his contributions to complex systems, awarded Doctor Honoris Causa from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, became an elected Fellow in AAAS (Physics), and is a 2013 Fellow of the Massachusetts Academy of Sciences.