Introduction

 

  

Péter Csermely (1958) served as a bridge many times. As a Lutheran pastor and as a professor he links belief and science, he connected high school student with professors and talents with their neighborhood. As a chemist he became a professor in the medical environment of the Semmelweis University. He leads a network science research group (LINK-Group) where medical doctors, biologists, physicists, computer scientists, secondary school students (and a lot of others…) work together. He examines the adaptation, learning and decision-making mechanisms of complex systems and their network representations. According to his colleagues he is slightly graphomaniac. He published 15 books and more than 300 scientific articles. His Google Scholar citations are more than 23,000. He is a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Academia Europaea. He is not only a network scientist but became committed to the development of social networks as a life-time mission. He launched the Hungarian Research Student movement in 1995, an initiative which provided research possibilities to more than 10,000 talented high school students in Hungary and abroad. Several families of former research students have been formed in the past two decades. He was the founding president of the Hungarian Talent Support Council between 2006 and 2016. Between 2012 and 2020 he was the president of the European Council for High Ability. He initiated a talent support network spanning 50 countries in many continents with the help of Csilla Fuszek and a lot of other colleagues.

The Parkinson’s Law on scientific research (researchers who are better than the average are swamped with functions by the colleagues to curtail their time for further research) has had only a little impact on him, being very lucky and effective declining formal functions. From 2008 until 2010 he was a member of the Wise Persons’ Council of the President of Hungary. He resigned most of his functions a long time ago in order to spare time for spiritual depth and service. He received a substantial number of awards, among which he is the most happy about those that are not on this list: his students and the precious life-experience that he received from his friends over the years.

Between 2018 and 2022 he was a member of the Congregation Council of the Budapest Angyalföld Lutheran church, between 2020 and 2022 he served as the President of the Council. He completed several Saint Ignatian spiritual exercises including one for 32-weeks in 2017 and another for 30-days in 2018. He also enjoyed the spiritual exercises of the nuns of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the nuns of Discalced Carmelites, István Jelenits SchP as well as Jákó Fehérváry OSB and Balázs Szászi. He made pilgrimages to the birthplace and tomb of Saint Theresa of Ávila, Apostle James at Santiago de Compostela, Manresa and the Holy Land. In 2018 he completed the pastoral care course of Katalin Hélisz. In 2017 he devoted his life to the service of Jesus Christ, in 2018 he made a vow of purity. He obtained an MA degree of theology and priesthood at the Lutheran University of Theology in Budapest in 2022. In July 2022 he was ordained as a Lutheran pastor. He serves the university students in Budapest, Hungary in a growing oecumenic community.

His foster son, István Csermely is a teacher of children in a state orphanage with an enormous sense of justice, responsibility and devotion. Vilma, his dog is a cute miniature dachshund, who is "blessed" with a surprisingly large stubbornness and voracious appetite compared to her small size.

   

 

Scientific website of Peter Csermely

Recordings of Péter Csermely’s lectures

Péter Csermely’s major English books:

 

The team of the blog

In this century most work is a teamwork. I also have a great team helping the blog. The homepage was designed, built and is maintained by Peter Nemeth. I am thinking in half of my life in English and in the other half in Hungarian. However, I very much dislike translation between the two languages. Since Hungarian is my mother tongue, the blog posts are written first in this language. Initial blog posts were translated to English by Anikó Szécsi. I was re-phrasing the English text, during which I often re-wrote the Hungarian "original post", too. Some photos were re-colored by Balázs Baksa to fit to others.