He earned his degrees in crop production and later as a biotechnologist at the University of Agricultural Sciences in Gödöllő. Between 1988 and 1989, he worked at Meriklón Ltd., focusing on plant tissue and organ culture. Since 1990, he has been a researcher—currently a senior research fellow—at the Plant Protection Institute of the Centre for Agricultural Research (ATK NÖVI). His research interests lie in the interaction between plants and bacteria from physiological and molecular perspectives.

From the beginning of his career as a biologist, he has been deeply interested in the digital preservation, organization, and retrieval of acquired knowledge—both self-generated data and literature-based collections. This interest led him beyond standard office software to the extensive use of SQL, as well as exploring programming languages (Python, R), text-processing tools, and data models (Grep, Awk, regular expressions, RDF). He participated in data steward training courses at ELTE and HUN-REN. These experiences convinced him that research data could serve far more purposes than their current typical use, which is limited to being published in academic articles.

His task is to improve the scientific (re)usability of research data created at ATK. This requires preparing local data for global information integration through the highest possible level of automation. Achieving this calls for an understanding of the local data, the customary practices and requirements of their handling, and, based on this, developing training, regulations, and support for modern data management practices.

“The main goal of my work is to transform outdated data management habits and radically improve the machine-readability of research (meta)data. What I find most exciting about being a data steward is dealing with the diversity of data and developing methods for their discovery and use—such as metadata creation and organizing data into knowledge graphs.”