Albert-László Barabási was sitting in Central Café in Budapest, Hungary, when he got the call that he had been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for his work in network science.
Network science’s recognition has felt like a long time coming, he says.
In 2005, the National Research Council — “the operating and principal programmatic arm of the National Academies,” according to the National Academies website — published a report titled, simply, “Network Science.”
In it, Barabási says that “the Academy officially defined network science as an independent field of investigation that is not just simply part of mathematics or physics,” but an arena with its own set of questions that warrant specific pursuit and unique methods.
Barabási, the Robert Gray Dodge professor of network science and a distinguished university professor of physics at Northeastern University, has pursued this line of research since 1995. Now he becomes the first Northeastern faculty member to be elected to the NAS while employed at Northeastern.
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Photo by Ruby Wallau/Northeastern University
