NKFIH Excellence Projects to be Carried Out by Four ELTE Researchers

The Council has made its decision on applications submitted by August 31, 2025, for this year’s National Research Excellence Program, Excellence Subprogram. This scheme provides significant funding — up to 160 + 40 million forints — to researchers whose previous achievements have already demonstrated their standing among the international scientific elite, and who are considered strong candidates for the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) grants.

Out of the five proposals submitted, all were deemed worthy of support. Together, the five researchers will receive a total of 700 million forints.

All of the winning researchers studied at ELTE, and four of them are currently working there.

Three of the supported projects will be launched at Eötvös Loránd University, while one ELTE researcher will begin work at the HUN-REN Wigner Research Centre for Physics.

Tamás András Halm, a linguist, studied at Corvinus University of Budapest and at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), conducted research and worked at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, and is now pursuing his research at the ELTE Research Center for Linguistics in a particularly fascinating field. His project investigates how everyday fragmentary sentences work — the kinds of utterances we all use in conversation, such as “Be right back!” or simply “Coffee?”. These often lack essential elements, yet conversation partners easily understand them from the context and the situation.The research aims to uncover what truly constitutes the “core” of a sentence and brings us closer to a deeper understanding of the structure of human language and syntactic relations. Beyond its importance for linguistics, the project could also prove useful in language teaching, translation technology, and even in the development of speech-processing artificial intelligence — helping machines understand everyday, informal, and fragmentary communication.

Levente Littvay, a political scientist, studied at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where he also earned his PhD. After his time at Central European University, he is now conducting research at ELTE’s Centre for Social Sciences. His project, AskAI, uses artificial intelligence to reconstruct what people might have thought about a given topic in the past — and can even predict how public opinion might react to a future event. This “time machine” works by creating virtual respondents who react just as real people would have in different eras or under specific circumstances. The approach has the potential not only to revolutionize public opinion research, but also to support other fields by filling in missing data or testing ideas. In this way, decision-makers can receive well-founded situational analyses without the need for costly fieldwork.

Edit Mátyus graduated in chemistry at ELTE, and pursued her postdoctoral studies in Zurich before working at the University of Cambridge and later returning to ELTE. Her project explores how the rapid development of quantum technologies and atomic clocks can open new perspectives in studying everyday matter at the molecular level. The aim is to advance computational methods in molecular quantum mechanics so they keep pace with the latest measurement techniques, providing the essential tools for interpreting precision spectroscopic experiments. Beyond enabling the design of new experiments, these novel quantum-chemical methods are expected in the coming decades to pave the way for the technological application of molecular quantum states.

István Groma, Professor at ELTE’s Institute of Physics and Astronomy, will launch his project at the HUN-REN Wigner Research Centre for Physics. His aim is to develop a new theory of plasticity that takes into account the sudden, avalanche-like internal rearrangements within materials—drastic changes that ultimately lead to material failure. The new model could make it possible to predict when and how structural materials break down, reducing the risk of accidents and enabling safer, more reliable engineering solutions.

The funded researchers will begin implementing their projects no later than January 2026. The strategic goal of the Research Excellence Council is to ensure that the HUF 40 billion budget of the National Research Excellence Programme supports projects that generate significant scientific breakthroughs and enhance the international recognition of Hungarian researchers and research.