AI Summit 2025 Budapest

Dr. János Setényi

director
MCC Learning Research Institute

Born in Budapest in 1961, he pursued his university studies at the Faculty of Humanities at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), including a study program at the University of Helsinki. Originally trained as a historian, he earned his doctoral degree in educational sciences from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

He became a researcher at the Institute for Educational Research, which functioned both as a reform workshop and an intellectual hub for educational democratization. As a generalist, he deals with all sectors of education, with a particular focus on policy-making. From the outset, he established strong international professional ties and, over the past 25 years, has regularly worked on projects for the OECD, the Council of Europe, and the EU's Directorate-General for Employment. Through his continuous advisory work, he has gained extensive experience in educational development in the Balkans and the post-Soviet region.

In 1995, he founded one of Central Europe's first for-profit educational consulting firms, Expanzió Human Consulting Ltd. Since the turn of the millennium, his main area of interest has been evaluation — from policy-level to institutional and even training program-level evaluation. He is a founding member of the Hungarian Evaluation Society. In the past decade, his focus has shifted toward digitalization, educational industry innovations, and disruptive technologies; his publications explore new models of systemic integration in traditional schooling.

His involvement in higher education has been selective and focused: he is an honorary university professor and teaches courses at specialized colleges. He is a proficient user of English and Finnish and has intermediate command of Russian and Mandarin. For the past twenty years, he has practiced Chen-style taijiquan and is a formally accepted disciple.