Gábor Stépán, professor and former dean of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at BME, has officially become the first Hungarian foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The annual general assembly of the CAS was held at the end of June in Beijing’s Friendship Palace. The Hungarian researcher gave his inaugural lecture entitled Traffic Jams: Dynamics and Control, and was presented with his membership certificate by the President of the Academy, Hou Jianguo.

Gábor Stépán is a full member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His research interests include analytical mechanics, stability theory and nonlinear vibrations. He was elected as a foreign member of the CAS last year. After the decision, he spoke in our interview about how he has developed close ties with prominent Chinese academics.

Now he told bme.hu that it was a special honour for him to be the only foreign member to give a plenary lecture – in which he also spoke about the University of Technology, mentioning, among others, the Nobel laureates of BME.

One of them was also mentioned by a Chinese speaker, who spoke about the importance of attosecond lasers, often referring to Ferenc Krausz.