AI Summit Budapest 2025

Dr. László Kiss

director general
HUN-REN Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences

I am a triple citizen. I was born in Serbia and, half as a military deserter, ended up at the University of Szeged, where I earned my degree in astronomy. In 2002, the University of Sydney advertised a position that so perfectly matched my expertise, it might as well have specified that the applicant’s first name should be László. I applied—and I got the job. I spent seven years in Australia, conducting world-class research.

Then came the Momentum ("Lendület") Program of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, which allowed me to lead a Hungarian research group analyzing the latest results from the Kepler space telescope. I came back home—and I truly feel at home here.

When I started doing astronomy as a university student, I spent nights staring at a single star through a telescope and some simple instrument. I measured how its brightness and color changed, later its velocity, and then its spectrum. My doctoral dissertation was on variable stars, partly based on brightness estimates made with small telescopes by amateur astronomers.

Twenty years ago, we focused on individual stars. Today, no one cares about that anymore. It’s not one pulsating star that matters, but what 50,000 pulsating stars together can tell us about the structure of the Milky Way.

Life back home turned out to be eventful: election as a young academician, supervising dozens of undergraduate and postgraduate students, 8 PhD degrees and one Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences among my students. Teaching in astronomy programs at the University of Szeged and Eötvös Loránd University.

Science communication became a major part of my life too: I serve as editor-in-chief of the astronomy news portal csillagaszat.hu, and I’ve written 160 popular science articles, given interviews, appeared in radio and TV shows, and contributed to both scientific and popular magazines.

Yet, despite all this, what still gives me the greatest joy is simply stepping under the night sky—on a clear, moonless night, free of light pollution, barking dogs, or yelling neighbors—looking up, mouth open in awe at how beautiful it is.

I’m a terrible person, because in my heart I’ve remained an amateur astronomer. If I happen to find myself under a clear sky, I take my small telescope and just observe.

There was a time when I enjoyed hunting quasars. The most distant one I saw was about 5 billion light-years away. That was in the mid-90s, in the Bakony Mountains. I stared at that faint point of light through a 44 cm telescope until my eyes almost gave out. Those photons had left their source just as Earth was forming.

That kind of cosmic perspective gives me a feeling I can't replace with anything else. I still remember that night, that shiver down my spine...

As director of the Konkoly-Thege Miklós Astronomical Institute at the Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences (CSFK) of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, one of my most cherished goals and greatest joys has been to open the Svábhegy Observatory to the public.

It’s Budapest’s astronomical jewel, the largest and perhaps most beautiful and prestigious public observatory in Hungary. It’s a joy to come here every day—and to share the wonder of the night sky and the mind-shaping experience of observation with everyone!