Dénes is a researcher and thinker interested in how socio-technical systems interact with each other. He holds an assistant professorship at Lancaster University in the UK, where has a research portfolio in energy systems and a Visiting Professorship at the Babeș-Bolyai University in Romania, centered around data visualization and business intelligence. His data analyses and visualizations balance on the fine line between work and hobby and he has led educational workshops on sustainability and renewable energy across developing regions in Asia and Africa. He also leads the datactivism blogs Kontext and székelydata, exploring complex topics through data analysis and visualization.
Hungarian by origin, Dénes was born and raised in Transylvania, Romania and obtained a BSc in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca (2011). Later on, he moved to Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi (now Khalifa University) to pursue an MSc in Engineering Systems & Management (2013) and continued for a PhD in Interdisciplinary Engineering (2016), both in collaboration with Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US. He believes that it is not only the quality of the research that matters but also the quality of the presentation – placing therefore great emphasis on data visualization and story-telling with data, while trying to inspire the next generation of systems thinkers.