The Academia Europaea elected Lénárd Darázs, a lawyer, professor of law at ELTE Faculty of Law and rector of ELTE, as well as Máté Csanád, a physicist, university professor at ELTE Faculty of Science, and director of the Institute of Physics and Astronomy at ELTE Faculty of Science, as a full member in 2026.
Founded in 1988, Academia Europaea is a European, non-governmental organization whose aim is to recognize the highest level of academic excellence in all fields of science, to promote European research, to provide advice on scientific issues to governments and international organizations, and to foster interdisciplinary and international research.
Members of Academia Europaea are leading experts in the fields of physical sciences and technology, biological sciences and medicine, mathematics, humanities, social and cognitive sciences, economics and law. Most members are European researchers, but European scholars living in other regions of the world, as well as non-European scientists living outside Europe, may also be members. Admission is by invitation only, which is sent only after nomination, thorough examination, and confirmation of the scientific achievements and excellence of the nominee by an anonymous group of experts. The election is authorized by the Board of Trustees of Academia Europaea.
Lénárd Darázs is a lawyer, university professor, and the rector of ELTE. His areas of expertise are private law, competition law, and the legal regulation of the European data economy and data assets. In the field of private law, he has conducted in-depth research on the invalidity of contracts and contractual issues related to consumer protection. His central research area is domestic and European law against anti-competitive practices (cartels and abuses of dominant position), as well as the complex regulatory questions of distribution (goods traffic) systems. He has achieved significant results in laying the scientific foundations for the regulatory framework of the European Data Strategy, and in examining the legal and ethical issues of artificial intelligence.
Máté Csanád is a physicist, university professor, and director of the Institute of Physics and Astronomy at ELTE Faculty of Science. His scientific work is mainly related to high-energy particle and nuclear physics. His research focuses on revealing the properties of the matter formed during relativistic heavy-ion collisions—the quark-gluon plasma—with particular regard to its space-time structure and dynamics. His work gives special importance to hydrodynamic modeling and the methodology of femtoscopy, which enable the study of matter in extreme states generated in particle accelerators. He is actively involved in international research collaborations, including the RHIC accelerator experiments and various projects at CERN.