Albert-László Barabási

Albert-László Barabási (born 1967) is a Romanian-born Hungarian-American physicist known for his research in network science and network medicine. He is a distinguished university professor and Robert Gray Professor of Network Science at Northeastern University, with further appointments at Harvard Medical School and Central European University, and earlier held a chair of physics at the University of Notre Dame. In 1999 he mapped the World Wide Web and found that its link structure follows a power law, and with his student Réka Albert he proposed the Barabási-Albert model, in which growth and preferential attachment produce scale-free networks. He later showed that such networks resist random failure but are vulnerable to attacks on their hubs, helped found network medicine, and applied control theory to complex networks. He is the founding president of the Network Science Society.