Réka Albert

Réka Albert is a Romanian-Hungarian scientist, born in 1972, who is a distinguished professor of physics and an adjunct professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University. She is best known as the co-creator, with Albert-László Barabási, of the Barabási-Albert model, a way of generating scale-free random graphs through preferential attachment that became a standard model in network science. Her research extends to networks in a very general sense, including studies of how complex networks tolerate errors and withstand attacks, with an application to the vulnerability of the North American power grid, and more recently the dynamic modeling of biological networks and systems biology. She was born in Reghin in Transylvania, studied at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca and earned her doctorate at the University of Notre Dame in 2001. Her honours include a Sloan Research Fellowship, fellowship of the American Physical Society and election to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2025.