Gábor Horváth

full professor

PhD (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, 1994)

Habilitation (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, 2002)

Doctor of HAS (2005)

Biography:

Gábor Horváth was born in 1963 in Kiskunhalas, Hungary. In 1987 he received his diploma in physics from the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. Then he was a research assistant at the Department of Low Temperature Physics of the same university, where he investigated electrical percolation processes in granular superconductors. In 1989 he received a doctoral fellowship in the Biophysics Group of the Central Research Institute for Physics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Budapest), where he developed a mathematical description and computer modelling of retinal cometlike afterimages. He obtained his Ph.D. at the Eötvös University in 1991. His thesis in physiological optics was a computational study of the visual system and optical environment of certain animals. In 1991-1992 he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Zoology of the University of Regensburg (Germany), where together with Professor Rudolf Schwind he studied the polarization patterns of skylight reflected from water surfaces and the polarotaxis of aquatic insects. Then he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department for Biological Cybernetics of the University of Tübingen (Germany), where he measured natural polarization patterns and investigated the polarization-sensitive optomotor reaction in water insects together with Professor Dezső Varjú. In 1993 he finished his postdoctoral dissertation in computational visual optics to obtain the degree Candidate for Biophysical Science awarded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. For this treatise he won the first International Dennis Gabor Award. Between 1996 and 2018 he was an associate professor, and from 2018 he is a professor of biophysics and leader of the Environmental Optics Labortory at the Department of Biological Physics of the Eötvös University. From 2022 he is the leader of the Astropolarimetric Research Group of the HUN-REN-ELTE Hungarian Research Network in cooperaion with the Eötvös University. His main research interests are the optics of animal eyes and the visual environment, animal polarization sensitivity, polarization characteristics of the optical environment as well as various biomechanical problems. He designed imaging polarimeters with which he records and visualizes the polarization patterns in nature. He participated on several expeditions and polarimetric measuring campaigns in Hungary as well as in the Tunisian and Namibian deserts, Finnish Lapland, North Pole, and on the Atlantic Ocean. He was three times a Humboldt research fellow in the Universities of Tübingen and Regensburg. He wrote his first Springer monograph (2004) about polarization vision in Tübingen with Dezső Varjú. He edited and finished the second Springer book (2014) dealing with polarization in Regensburg. His third Springer monograph about polarization vision and environmental polarized light appeared in 2024. He won several Hungarian and international prizes and awards for his scientific achievements in biological optics.

Links to associated scientific database profiles:

• Publications in MTMT
• Publications in ORCID
• Publications in ResearcherID
• Publications in Scopus
• User profile at doktori.hu

Selected publications of recent years:

1. Gábor Horváth (editor) (2024) Polarization Vision and Environmental Polarized Light. 3rd, revised, extended edition. Springer Nature Switzerland AG: Cham, Switzerland p. 833 + xxvii, (DOI)
2. Gábor Horváth, Bence Dárdai, Máté Bíró, Judit Slíz-Balogh, Dénes Száz, András Barta, Ádám Egri (2024) The all-day pollinator visits of sunflower inflorescences in Helianthus annuus plantations are independent of head orientation: testing a wide-spread hypothesis. The Plant Journal 120: 1563-1576 (DOI)
3. Péter Takács, Dénes Száz, Balázs Bernáth, István Pomozi, Gábor Horváth (2024) Polarized light pollution of fixed-tilt photovoltaic solar panels measured by drone-polarimetry and its visual-ecological importance. Remote Sensing 16: 1177 (DOI)
4. Judit Slíz-Balogh, Attila Mádai, Pál Sári, András Barta, Gábor Horváth (2024) Observation of the L5 Kordylewski dust cloud with a portable imaging polarimetric telescope in the Namibian Khomas highland. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 530: 3570-3577 (DOI)
5. Gábor Horváth, Dénes Hegedűs, Judit Slíz-Balogh (2023) Change of world-record rankings of shot put and hammer throw due to the effects of Earth rotation and athlete’s height. Scientific Reports 13: 10409 (DOI)
6. Péter Takács, Dénes Száz, Ádám Pereszlényi, Gábor Horváth (2023) Speedy bearings to slacked steering: Mapping the navigation patterns and motions of Viking voyages. Public Library of Science One 18: e0293816 (DOI)
7. Péter Takács, Zoltán Kovács, Dénes Száz, Ádám Egri, Balázs Bernáth, Judit Slíz-Balogh, Magdolna Nagy-Czirok, Zsigmond Lengyel, Gábor Horváth (2022) Mature sunflower inflorescences face geographical east to maximize absorbed light energy: orientation of Helianthus annuus heads studied by drone photography. Frontiers in Plant Science 13: 842560 (DOI)
8. Péter Takács, Dénes Száz, Miklós Vincze, Judit Slíz-Balogh, Gábor Horváth (2022) Sunlit zebra stripes may confuse the thermal perception of blood vessels causing the visual unattractiveness of zebras to horseflies. Scientific Reports 12: 10871 (DOI)
9. Ádám Pereszlényi, Dénes Száz, Imre Miklós Jánosi, Gábor Horváth (2021) A new argument against cooling by convective air eddies formed above sunlit zebra stripes. Scientific Reports 11: 15797 (DOI)
10. Gábor Horváth, Judit Slíz-Balogh, Ákos Horváth, Ádám Egri, Balázs Virágh, Dániel Horváth, Imre M. Jánosi (2020) Sunflower inflorescences absorb maximum light energy if they face east and afternoons are cloudier than mornings. Scientific Reports 10: 21597 (DOI)