71 Notable alumni of University of Szeged

Kalman Laki, sometimes referred to as Koloman Laki, was a Hungarian-American biochemist who contributed to the discovery of factor XIII. He was a scientist at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Gábor Béla Fodor was a Hungarian-American chemist, medical research scientist, and professor of chemistry. His work in academia, which spanned six decades in Europe and later in North America, specialized in research of antidotes, painkillers, tropane alkaloids, and derivatives of vitamin C. His research helped in finding treatments for cancer, strokes, Alzheimer's disease, and other illnesses.

Géza Fodor was a Hungarian mathematician, working in set theory. He received a PhD from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1954, advised by László Kalmár and Paul Erdős. His dissertation was titled " Investigation of the structure of set mappings".

Zoltán Lukács is a Hungarian politician who was a member of the National Assembly from the Hungarian Socialist Party's Komárom-Esztergom County Regional List from 2006 to 2014, and from its national list from 2014 to 2018.

Mihály Balázs is a Hungarian Catholic historian and professor of religious history at the University of Szeged. He is widely regarded as an expert on the religious history of Hungarian-speaking Transylvania.

William Juhasz was a Hungarian-American author, editor, cultural and religious historian, journalist, Roman Catholic lay intellectual, literary translator, university professor, lecturer, commentator, Cold War operative. His research focused on the comparative religious history of pre-Christian times.

Sándor Csernus is a Hungarian historian, associate professor (docent, reader), diplomat, former dean of Faculty of Arts, University of Szeged and director of the Hungarian Institute of Paris. He is fluent in Hungarian and French.

Enikő A. Sajti is a Hungarian historian and professor emerita of Faculty of Arts, University of Szeged. She has been active in research of the relationship between Serbia & Croatia (Yugoslavia) and Hungary for decades. She is a notable and respected scientist both in Hungary and around the world.

Sándor Csörgő was a Hungarian mathematician, and a professor at the University of Szeged.

József Tóth was a Hungarian geographer and academic, who served as Rector of the University of Pécs between 1997 and 2003.

Endre Bíró was a Hungarian biochemist whose research findings in the biochemistry of the muscle and muscle contraction found international recognition. (His full name is Miklós Endre Bíró translated into English as Nicholas Andrew Bíró hence in his publications in English he is referred to as N. A. Bíró.)

Camille Sandorfy, OC CQ FRSC was a Hungarian - Canadian quantum chemist.

Peter Heszler was a Hungarian physicist. He is well known for, among others, his research on laser-assisted nanoparticle synthesis. His research included nanotechnology, condensed matter physics, materials science, fluctuations and noise, laser science and chemical sensors, including fluctuation-enhanced sensing.

Ádám Anderle was a Hungarian historian, hispanist, full (university) professor, professor emeritus of Faculty of Arts, University of Szeged (SZTE). He was active in research of the relationship between Latin America and Hungary for decades. He was fluent in Hungarian and Spanish.

Dr. István Vitányi is a Hungarian jurist and politician, member of the National Assembly (MP) for Berettyóújfalu (Hajdú-Bihar County Constituency V then IV) from 2002 to 2006 and since 2010. He was also MP from the Hajdú-Bihar County Regional List of Fidesz from 1998 to 2002, and from 2006 to 2010.

Anita Heringes is a Hungarian politician. She served as a Member of Parliament of the Hungarian Socialist Party Member of Parliament for the opening session, and an of the Committee on Sustainable Development from 2014 to 2018.

Laszlo Bela Kish is a physicist and professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University. His activities include a wide range of issues surrounding the physics and technical applications of stochastic fluctuations (noises) in physical, biological and technological systems, including nanotechnology. His earlier long-term positions include the Department of Experimental Physics, University of Szeged, Hungary (JATE, 1982–1997), and...

Zoltán Majó or Zoltán Majó-Petri is a Hungarian economist. He is associate professor (docent, reader), former director-general for Economic and Technological Affairs of the University of Szeged and acting director of Szeged Transport Ltd.

Miklós Zelei was a Hungarian poet, writer, and journalist.

Dr. Erika Szabó is a Hungarian jurist and politician, who served as Secretary of State for Public Administration and Justice between 2 June 2010 and 5 June 2014. As candidate of Fidesz, she became a member of the National Assembly (MP) in the 1998 parliamentary election. She was also MP between 1990 and 1994, as member of the Alliance of...

Endre Dudich was a Hungarian Kossuth Prize-winning professor, academician, and zoologist, noted for his application of mathematical methods for variational study of insects.

Irén Lovász is a Hungarian folk singer and ethnographer. She has a total of 12 albums to her credit, including on the Erdenklang Music, CC'nC Records, Fono, and Hungaroton Classics labels as well as recent CDs on her own SIRENVOICES label. She is featured on several compilations, including on the HEARTS OF SPACE label, WARNER MUSIC France, Minos-EMI, and other...

Pál Vastagh is a Hungarian politician and jurist, who served as Minister of Justice between 1994 and 1998. He joined to the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (MSZMP) in 1966. During the democratic changes in Hungary (1989–1990) he supported the communist rule and the Workers' Militia which Vastagh called the "people's army". In 1989 he was a founding member of the...

Krisztián Cser is a Hungarian operatic and concert singer (bass) and physicist, the soloist of the Hungarian State Opera.

László Makra is a Hungarian climatologist and university professor. His main research area is pollen climatology and, within this, analysis of climatological relationships of ragweed pollen, as well as relationship between ragweed pollen concentration and respiratory diseases.

Dezső Csejtei is a Hungarian philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of Szeged. Dezső is known for his expertise on hermeneutics, philosophy of history and theology. He is a former president of Hungarian Philosophical Society.

Ernő Mihályfi was a Hungarian politician, who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1947. He learned in the Budapest University of Technology and Economics then fought in the First World War. After the war, he worked as a journalist. Between 1923 and 1924, he worked and lived in the United States. Mihályfi was member of the Independent Smallholders, Agrarian...

Ilona Banga was a Hungarian biochemist known for co-discovering actomyosin and working to characterize how actin and myosin interact to produce muscle contraction. She and her husband József Mátyás Baló discovered the first elastase – an enzyme capable of degrading the protein elastin which gives tissues like veins their flexibility. She also contributed to work that earned Albert Szent-Györgyi the...

Matija Petar Katančić was a Croatian writer and scholar. His fields include poetry, literary theory, philology, lexicography, aesthetics, archaeology, and numismatics. He is considered the father of Croatian archaeology in modern Croatia.

Béla Szőkefalvi-Nagy [beːlɒ søːkɛfɒlvi nɒɟ] was a Hungarian mathematician. His father, Gyula Szőkefalvi-Nagy was also a famed mathematician. Szőkefalvi-Nagy collaborated with Alfréd Haar and Frigyes Riesz, founders of the Szegedian school of mathematics. He contributed to the theory of Fourier series and approximation theory. His most important achievements were made in functional analysis, especially, in the theory of Hilbert space...

András Hajnal was a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University and a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences known for his work in set theory and combinatorics.

Gyula Kristó was a Hungarian historian and medievalist, and also a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Zoltán Király is a Hungarian journalist, educator and politician, member of the National Assembly (MP) for Szeged (Csongrád County Constituency V then II) between 1985 and 1994.

András Aradszki, is a Hungarian politician and member of the National Assembly for Érd (MP) since 2010. He was appointed Secretary of State for Energy in the Ministry of National Development in 2014. As a Member of Parliament, he worked in the Committee for Economic and Information Technology and Committee on Sustainable Development. He was also a member of the...

Karig Sára was a Hungarian poet best known for her humanitarian efforts during the Second World War. She was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations in 1985.

Ferenc Erdei was a Hungarian politician and sociologist. Initially a member of the National Peasant Party (NPP), he supported the party's merging into the Hungarian Working People's Party (MDP) and held a number of ministerial positions after World War II and in the Hungarian People's Republic.

Sándor Fazekas is a Hungarian jurist and politician. He served as Minister of Rural Development, then Minister of Agriculture from 2010 to 2018, in the second and third cabinets of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. He served as mayor of his hometown, Karcag between 1990 and 2010.

Dr. István Ujhelyi is a Hungarian politician from the Hungarian Socialist Party, who was MP in the National Assembly of Hungary between 2002 and 2014. He served as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from 2014 to 2024.

János Martonyi is a Hungarian politician, who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1998 to 2002 and from 2010 to 2014. He is a member of the Fidesz – Hungarian Civic Union party. He was part of the Amato Group that unofficially drafted a new treaty for the European Union after the European Constitution was rejected by the French...

Peter Thomas Bauer, Baron Bauer, FBA was a Hungarian-born British development economist. Bauer is best remembered for his opposition to the then widely-held notion that the most effective manner to help developing countries advance is through state led development planning supported by foreign aid.

György Bakondi border guard, lawyer, between 2000 and 2002 as well as from 1 July 2010 to 15 April 2015 Senior Director of Disaster Management Directorate of Interior Ministry, government commissioner.

Koloman Brenner is a Hungarian linguist, politician, and associate professor. He belongs to the ethnic German community of Hungary. Between 2014 and 2017, he was the Deputy Director of the German Institute of the Faculty of Humanities at Eötvös Loránd University. His research fields are the phonetics and phonology of the German language, German and comparative dialectology, minority languages, and...

Gyula Ortutay was a Hungarian ethnographer and politician, who served as Minister of Religion and Education between 1947 and 1950.

Henrik Havas is a Hungarian journalist who served as spokesman of the Hungarian government from 1 November 1995 to 7 November 1995.

Tímea Szabó is a Hungarian humanitarian worker, journalist and politician. She has been a member of the National Assembly (MP) since 2010 from the Politics Can Be Different (LMP) National List, and since the 2014 election as a member of Dialogue for Hungary (PM).

István Bibó was a Hungarian lawyer, civil servant, politician and political theorist.

Alfréd Rényi was a Hungarian mathematician known for his work in probability theory, though he also made contributions in combinatorics, graph theory, and number theory.

László István Botka is a Hungarian politician. Botka was a member of the Hungarian Socialist Party between 1991 and 2019, and the current mayor of Szeged.

Olivér Várhelyi is a Hungarian lawyer and diplomat who is the European Commissioner for Health and Animal Welfare in the von der Leyen Commission II since December 2024. He previously served as the European Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement from 2019 to 2024 after the rejection of László Trócsányi by the European Parliament.

László Trócsányi is a Hungarian lawyer, academic, diplomat, politician and Member of the European Parliament (MEP) since 2019. Formerly, he was the Hungarian Ambassador to Belgium and Luxembourg from 2000 to 2004, a member of the Constitutional Court of Hungary between 2007 and 2010 and Hungarian Ambassador to France from 2010 to 2014. He was Minister of Justice in the...

József Pálinkás is a Hungarian atomic physicist and politician who served as Minister of Education between 2001 and 2002. He was President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences from 2008 to 2014.

Ágnes Kunhalmi is a Hungarian socialist politician. She is a Member of the National Assembly since the 2014 election, and a Member of the executive board of the Hungarian Socialist Party, since 2018. She was the Female co-chair of the Hungarian Socialist Party, between 19 September 2020 and 19 October 2024.

Miklós Kásler was a Hungarian oncologist, academic, director of the National Institute of Oncology and Minister of Human Resources from 2018 to 2022.

Albert Imre Szent-Györgyi de Nagyrápolt was a Hungarian biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937. He is credited with first isolating vitamin C and discovering many of the components and reactions of the citric acid cycle and the molecular basis of muscle contraction.

Miklós Radnóti was a Hungarian poet, an outstanding representative of modern Hungarian lyric poetry as well as a certified secondary school teacher of Hungarian and French. He is characterised by his striving for pure genre and his revival of traditional, tried and tested genres.

Tamás Sulyok is a Hungarian politician and lawyer who has been serving as the president of Hungary since 2024. He was the president of the Constitutional Court from 2016 until 2024. He was the Fidesz–KDNP candidate for the 2024 presidential election.

László Toroczkai is a Hungarian politician, journalist, leader of the far-right Our Homeland Movement political party, and former mayor of Ásotthalom. He is also a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and vice-president of Board of the Hungarian National Group of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (2022-2026). Also chairman of Hungary-Bahrain Friendship Group 2022- and chairman of Hungary-Rwanda...

János Lázár, is a Hungarian politician and Member of Parliament. He was former leader of the Fidesz parliamentary group (2010–2012) and State Secretary, then Minister of Prime Minister's Office (2012–2018) in the cabinets of Viktor Orbán. In this capacity, he was regarded as de facto the second most powerful member of the cabinet, but lost political influence by 2018. He...

Katalin "Kati" Karikó is a Hungarian-American biochemist who specializes in ribonucleic acid (RNA)-mediated mechanisms, particularly in vitro-transcribed messenger RNA (mRNA) for protein replacement therapy. Karikó laid the scientific groundwork for mRNA vaccines, overcoming major obstacles and skepticism in the scientific community. Karikó received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2023 for her work, along with American immunologist Drew...

Attila József was one of the most famous Hungarian poets of the 20th century. Generally not recognized during his lifetime, József was hailed during the communist era of the 1950s as Hungary's great "proletarian poet" and he has become the best known of the modern Hungarian poets internationally.

László Krasznahorkai is a Hungarian writer, novelist and screenwriter. Krasznahorkai is known for his difficult and demanding novels, often labeled postmodern, which explore dystopian and melancholic themes. Several of his works, including his novels Satantango (1985) and The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), have been adapted into feature films by the director Béla Tarr.

Tibor Radó was a Hungarian mathematician who moved to the United States after World War I.

Tibor Szele was a Hungarian mathematician, working in combinatorics and abstract algebra.

Ferenc Győri is a Hungarian ultramarathon runner, geographer, and university lecturer.

Tünde Szabó is a Hungarian retired female swimmer and politician.

Péter Márki-Zay, often referred to by his initials MZP, is a Hungarian politician, marketer, economist, electrical engineer and historian. He has served as mayor of Hódmezővásárhely since 2018, and is the co-founder of the Everybody's Hungary. As the winner of the 2021 opposition primary, he was the candidate of the United for Hungary challenging Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in the...

Gyula Koi is a Hungarian legal scholar and lecturer. His main research fields are administrative law, and theory of public administration. His Chinese name is Guo Yi.

Miklós Jancsó was a Hungarian film director and screenwriter. Jancsó achieved international prominence starting in the mid-1960s with works including The Round-Up (Szegénylegények, 1965), The Red and the White (Csillagosok, katonák, 1967), and Red Psalm (Még kér a nép, 1971).

Judit Czunyiné Bertalan is a Hungarian politician, member of the National Assembly (MP) for Kisbér then Komárom (Komárom-Esztergom County Constituency III) since 2014. She was a member of the Committee on Youth, Social, Family, and Housing affairs from 14 May 2010 to 14 February 2011.

Katalin Éva Veresné Novák is a Hungarian politician who served as president of Hungary from 2022 to 2024. Elected at the age of 44, she was the first woman and youngest person ever to hold the post. Prior to her presidency, she had been a member of the National Assembly for Fidesz from 2018 to 2022, during which time she...