Albert-László Barabási is a Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University, where he directs the Center for Complex Network Research. He is also a member of the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at Dana Farber Cancer Institute, the technology hospital of Harvard Medical School. A Hungarian born native of Transylvania, as an undergraduate student he worked as a scientific correspondent for the largest Hungarian general audience weekly in Bucharest. He received his Masters in Theoretical Physics at the Eötvös University in Budapest, Hungary and was awarded a Ph.D. three years later at Boston University. After a year at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, he joined Notre Dame as an Assistant Professor, to be promoted Professor and Endowed Chair at the unprecedented age of 33. Currently he is one of the most cited scientists. He is the recipient of the National Science Foundation's CAREER Award and the Office of Naval Research's Young Investigator Award, the von Neumann Award for Computer Science and the FEBS Anniversary Prize for Systems Biology. He was elected member of the Hungarian National Academy and Academia Europeae.
Barabási is the author of Linked: The New Science of Networks, currently available in eleven languages. He is the co-author of Fractal Concepts in Surface Growth (Cambridge, 1995), which is by far the most cited text in this area, and the co-editor (with M. Newman and D. Watts) of The Structure and Dynamics of Networks (Princeton, 2005). His seminal work on complex networks leading to the discovery of scale-free networks, 19 degrees of separation, the Internet's Achilles Heel, and his work on cellular networks have been widely featured in the media, including the cover of Nature, Science News and many other journals, and written about in Science, Science News, New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, American Scientist, Discover, Business Week, Die Zeit, El Pais, Le Monde, London's Daily Telegraph, National Geographic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, New Scientist, and La Republica, among others. He has been interviewed by BBC Radio, National Public Radio, CBS and ABC News, CNN, NBC, and many other media outlets.