This informal information is provided by me (A.T.) personally and is not to be understood as official information coming from any institution or funding source.
What kind of postdoc position will be available and when?
My grant includes funding for hiring a postdoc on a 50% position for two years (2027-2028) at the HUN-REN Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics.
Starting the position earlier (in 2025 or 2026) and/or taking a one-year full position instead of a two-year part-time one may be possible upon agreement.
(Regarding any option apart from the two-year 50% position, details have to be clarified, but my colleagues at the Institute and I will do my best in order to hire a suitable candidate.)
Am I a suitable candidate for this postdoc position? What is the research subject of the position?
If you are a math postdoc or PhD student close to defending your thesis, working in probability theory and being interested in stochastic population genetics, population dynamics, interacting particle systems, epidemiological models or related fields and you would like to work on questions related to my research proposal, please contact me (András Tóbiás, tobias_AT_cs.bme.hu).
If so far you have not done research on models motivated by biology but you have a strong background e.g. on point processes, stochastic geometry, percolation or models of statistical physics, Markov processes (such as interacting particle systems), branching processes, large deviations or stochastic differential equations, you may still be a suitable candidate. I myself also worked on something different during my PhD (while I already took some courses on stochastic processes in evolution during my master).
Note that your research subject during your postdoc has to be related to my research proposal. Among these areas, there is some flexibility regarding which project(s) you want to join, and you will also have the opportunity to initiate your own projects (alone or with the coauthors of your choice); there should also be some spare time for projects outside the scope of my research plan where you only have to acknowledge the funding.
What are the tasks of the postdoc having this position? Do I have to speak Hungarian? Do I have to teach? Can I teach if I want?
This position is research-only, there are no teaching duties and therefore speaking Hungarian is not required. At the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics, currently quite many international postdocs and PhD students are working, so you will not be the only foreigner around.
Nevertheless, if you are interested in practicing teaching, I will try to ensure that you can give an exercise class for Computer engineering students in English at my university department.
How about the salary?
Compared to academic salaries in Hungary, the salary of this postdoc position is relatively good. In case you come to Budapest as a foreign researcher on a full position funded by my grant for one year, you will be able to afford a normal life with reasonable housing from it, at least if you do not have multiple additional people to take care of. Compared to Western European postdoc positions, the salary is relatively low, but the cost of living is also lower.
The total amount of the salary is kind of fixed, so the earlier you come, the more it is worth. We can discuss the concrete figures privately if you want. For Hungarians: so far, the salary is better than at state-funded universities (also better than at BME after the currently planned wage increase), but it is somewhat less than the highest possible salary available for the most competitive postdoc positions at the institute.
How about travel funding options?
Our travel funding opportunities are actually quite good. With the original plan of a 50% position for two years, you should be able to travel to conferences, summer schools, visiting coauthors for collaboration etc. for ca. 3 weeks a year, and within the two years, one more expensive trip with a destination outside Europe should also be possible. The budget should allow us to travel to conferences both together and separately (you can also choose some trips according to your own interest). Short trips such as attending the Budapest-Vienna Probability Seminar in Vienna once a year should also fit into the travel budget.
A daily allowance is also available for the business trips.
Will there also be some relevant academic events in Budapest during the time of the postdoc position (connected to the grant or not)?
Yes, for 2028 we are planning a small one-week workshop (with at least 15-20 participants) on stochastic models of the spread of beneficial mutations and other invasion models at the Erdős Center, funded by the grant.
Apart from that, at the Erdős Center there are regularly conferences, summer or winter schools, and focused workshops on various topics, often involving probability theory.
I regularly attend the "SPIELE" - Stochastic Processes in EvoLution and Ecology online seminar organized by my coauthor Jochen Blath, as a postdoc you would also be welcome to attend and give talks here.
Attending the Theoretical Ecology Webinar is also an opportunity, I am in contact with the organizers, some of whom also work in Budapest.
At the Rényi Institute, the Monday afternoon research seminar "Kutszem" is the most relevant for us, which is officially on groups and graphs, but often there are talks purely in probability theory, or on models related to statistical physics or graph limits. Apart from that, sometimes there are probability seminars at the institute and also at the Budapest universities.
There are sometimes research seminars on stochastics both at my university and the Eötvös University, I am also in contact with the probability group in Szeged. The aforementioned Budapest-Vienna probability seminar takes place twice a year, once here, once there.