| Réka Albert | |
| Birth Date: | 2 March 1972 |
| Birth Place: | Reghin, Romania |
| Nationality: | Romanian, Hungarian, American |
| Field: | Network Science |
| Work Institutions: | Pennsylvania State University |
| Alma Mater: | Babeș-Bolyai University (B.S., M.S.), University of Notre Dame (Ph.D.) |
| Known For: | Barabási–Albert model, research on scale-free networks |
| Prizes: | Sloan Research Fellow (2004) NSF CAREER Award (2007) Fellow of the American Physical Society (2010) Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award (2011) External member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (2016) Fellow of the Network Science Society (2018) Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2019) |
Réka Albert (born 2 March 1972[1]) is a Romanian-Hungarian scientist. She is a distinguished professor of physics and adjunct professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University[2] [3] and is noted for the Barabási–Albert model and research into scale-free networks and Boolean modeling of biological systems.
Albert was born in Reghin, a city in Mureș County, located in the historical region of Transylvania, in the north-central part of Romania. She obtained her B.S. and M.S. degrees from Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, in 1995 and 1996, respectively. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame in 2001.[3]
Albert is co-creator, together with Albert-László Barabási, of the Barabási–Albert model for generating scale-free random graphs via preferential attachment (see Barabási–Albert model).
Her work extends to networks in a very general sense, involving for instance investigations on the error tolerance and attack vulnerability of complex networks[4] and its applications to the vulnerability of the North American power grid.[5] [6]
Her current research focuses on dynamic modeling of biological networks and systems biology.
Albert was selected as a Sloan Research Fellow in 2004 and was awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2007.She was named Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2010.[7] One year later she received the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award.[2] [8] In 2016 she was inducted as an external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.[9] She was elected Fellow of the Network Science Society in 2018[10] and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2019.[11]