Accepting the invitation of Balázs Hankó, minister of culture and innovation, Ferenc Krausz, Nobel Prize-winning physicist and professor of physics, will strengthen the cause of Hungarian science and research as chief science policy advisor from 1 October 2024. Professor Krausz’s work will be supported by the Nobel Prize Laureates’ Office.

As the new role is incompatible with the chairmanship of the Research Council of Hungary (KKT), Professor Krausz will step down from the Council on 30 September. Ferenc Krausz proposed Péter Domokos, director of the Institute of Solid State Physics and Optics at the HUN-REN Wigner Research Centre for Physics, as his successor, i.e. the new chair of the KKT, as of 1 October, and he won the support of minister Balázs Hankó, HUN-REN president Balázs Gulyás and MTA president Tamás Freund, who nominate the chair of the KKT. In addition to his role as the chair of the Research Council, Péter Domokos will also hold the newly created position of co-president for science of the National Research, Development and Innovation Office. Ferenc Krausz and Péter Domokos will work to strengthen Hungarian science and research: their aim is to enable Hungarian scientific excellence to carry out their research under internationally competitive conditions, and to attract more Hungarian and foreign researchers to Hungary, Hungarian universities and research institutes.

Ferenc Krausz, as chief science policy advisor, is even more strongly than before in support of strengthening science and research in Hungary. His primary task for the Nobel Prize Laureates’ Office was to bring home Hungarian researchers of proven excellence currently working abroad.

Accepting and supporting the personal proposal of Ferenc Krausz, minister of culture and innovation Balázs Hankó proposed Péter Domokos to HUN-REN president Balázs Gulyás and MTA president Tamás Freund as the new president of the KKT from 1 October 2024. Péter Domokos, physicist, full member of the MTA and Academia Europaea, director of the Institute of Solid State Physics and Optics at the HUN-REN Wigner Research Centre for Physics, and technical coordinator of the Quantum Information Science National Laboratory, accepted the invitation of the three nominators. Péter Domokos received his PhD degree from the Kastler Brossel Laboratory of the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris in 1998, during which he established the principle of the first universal two-bit quantum logic gate in 1995. He is a researcher of quantum operations based on the interaction of atoms and photons, and co-author of a seminal 2013 review article on the subject. He has participated as a consortium partner in several EU framework programmes. He has published 92 scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals and received a total of 3582 citations. From 2019 to 2022, he was Divisional Associate Editor of Physical Review Letters, a prestigious journal of the American Physical Society.

In the future, the role of the KKT will be further strengthened by the fact that the current KKT chair will also hold the newly created position of co-president for science of the NRDI Office, as planned by the KIM. This will bring the system of research funding based on individual excellence, i.e. the structure and content of each funding scheme, the design of the proposal review and assessment system, the decision-making and the operational management of the whole process under the control of the KKT and its chair. The KIM has set a strategic goal to significantly increase the resources of the Research Sub-fund of the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund in order to enable excellent Hungarian scientists to carry out their research work in excellent funding and infrastructure conditions, also by international standards.

The Hungarian Government aims to put Hungary among the top 10 innovators in Europe by 2030 and the top 10 innovators in the world by 2040. This requires a long-term predictable research funding system with significant resources for researchers working in Hungarian universities and research institutions. The further strengthening of the role of the KKT and the creation of the co-president for science of the NRDI Office will serve this purpose.

Source: Ministry for Culture and Innovation