Orsolya Anna Pipek graduated as a physicist from ELTE and obtained her doctoral degree from the same institution. She currently works as a research fellow at the Department of Physics of Complex Systems, Faculty of Science, ELTE. Her primary research areas are data science and bioinformatics, specifically cancer genomics, epigenomics, genomic monitoring, and the study of the molecular patterns of ageing. Her work bridges the methodologies of physics and mathematics with questions in bioinformatics and medical research. She develops machine learning-based “epigenetic clocks”, identifies diagnostic and immunotherapeutic biomarkers in large datasets, explored the evolution of viral genomes (coinfections, recombination) during the COVID pandemic, and uses mathematical modelling to study metastasis patterns in cancer. She developed a mutation detection software that enables the precise and rapid identification of DNA alterations from genome sequencing data. She has participated in several national and international projects (Hungarian Oncogenome and Personalized Tumor Diagnostics and Therapy National Project, TRACERx Renal, COMPARE, VEO, BY-COVID), and is currently developing innovative computational methods for analysing methylation data from different platforms in ageing research, supported by the NKFIH STARTING program. At ELTE, she teaches several BSc and MSc courses to physics and biology students, primarily in programming, computational data science, and bioinformatics. Alongside her teaching, she frequently engages in science communication, giving presentations to secondary-school and adult audiences (panel discussions, Pint of Science, ELTE recruitment programs). Her achievements have been recognised with multiple awards. In 2024, she won the Junior Prima Award in the Hungarian Science category, and in 2025, she received the Youth Award of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Hungarian Scholarship, and the Promising Researcher of ELTE Award. From 2025 to 2028, she holds a Bolyai János Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She is a member of the Hungarian Bioinformatics Society and a regular reviewer for several international journals.
