Albert-László Barabási

Research interests

• Network science
• Properties of sub-cellular networks in understanding human disease
• Control theory

Education

• PhD in Physics, Boston University
• MS in Theoretical Physics, Eötvös Loránd University — Hungary
• BS in Physics and Engineering, University of Bucharest — Romania

Biography

Albert-László Barabási is the Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science and a Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University, based in Boston. He directs the Center for Complex Network Research and holds appointments in the College of Science and the Khoury College of Computer Sciences.

Outisde of Northeastern, Barabási holds appointments in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in the Channing Division of Network Science. He is a member of the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

A Hungarian-born native of Transylvania, Romania, Barabási conducted the work that led to the discovery of scale-free networks in 1999. Following that, he proposed the Barabási-Albert model to explain their widespread emergence in natural, technological, and social systems, from the cellular telephone to online communities. Barabási has authored several books, including "Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do" (2010) and "Linked: The New Science of Networks" (2002); both are available in numerous languages. He also co-edited "The Structure and Dynamics of Networks" (2005).

Barabási is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and has received many awards for his work. In 2004, he was elected to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 2005, he won the FEBS Anniversary Prize for Systems Biology. A year later, he won the 2006 John von Neumann Medal for outstanding achievements in computer science. He joined the Academia Europaea in 2007, and in 2008 he received the C&C Prize from the NEC C&C Foundation. In 2009, APS named him Outstanding Referee, and the US National Academies of Sciences awarded him the Cozzarelli Prize. In 2011, he was awarded the CRT Foundation's Lagrange Prize for contributions to complex systems and became an AAAS fellow in physics. In 2013, he became a Fellow of the Massachusetts Academy of Sciences, and in 2014, he won the Prima Primissima Award for his contributions to network science.

Barabási's lab focuses on network science and its applications, exploring fundamental questions in complex systems using tools from network science, control theory, and statistical physics. The lab comprises three key segments; research on network biology explores the properties of sub-cellular networks and their applications to human diseases, the lab network control aims to understand the controllability of complex systems, and the group on science of success explores the network and non-network characteristics that contribute to the success of nodes, webpages, and scientific collaboration networks.

Projects

Recent publications