Daniel Csanády

Daniel Csanády is a project coordinator at Wigner Research Centre for Physics. Since 2014, he has been coordinating the in-kind contributions of the Wigner Centre to ESS. In 2015, he was delegated to the In-kind Review Committee of ESS by the National Office for Research, Development and Innovation of Hungary and he is still working as the Hungarian member of the IKRC. Recently he also serves as the Hungarian Field Coordinator of the South-East In-kind Hub of BrightnESS.

- I have been involved in BrightnESS since the preparation of its proposal. Wigner Research Centre for Physics is heavily involved in the scientific work package, but we are taking part in the non-scientific, organisational development and awareness raising work packages as well. During the project design my task was to plan Wigner’s contributions to the non-scientific work packages.

I am neither a physicist nor an engineer but a social scientist with a legal background. In addition to being a lecturer at several Hungarian universities I was consulting not-for-profit organisations and social enterprises since the early ‘90s. I have gained my international development experiences in the Central European region, in Scotland and in the United States.

Originally, I was asked to support the administration of Wigner’s in-kind contributions to ESS. Later on, I had the privilege of being the Hungarian delegate to the In-Kind Review Committee of ESS and to foster in-kind contributions of different research institutes of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences as an In-kind Field Coordinator of Brightness.

Practically speaking, my work to facilitate Hungarian in-kind contributions is essentially a collaboration building task and a continuous problem-solving exercise. I am analysing human and financial conditions of promising R&D activities, clarifying and compromising interests on both sides of an actual contribution, as well as seeking for good practices, organisational innovations, useful procedures and legal precedents during the realisation of in-kind contributions to ESS. In most parts of Continental Europe, the legal concept of ‘in-kind’ is fairly new. Therefore, we are creating this concept by doing it.

If you are working for the success of ESS, you are working for a much larger community than your special department or research laboratory, on a potentially Europe-wide area, where you can contribute to a brighter future of your colleagues, your academic community and hopefully that of Europe. I like the multi-disciplinary and overall international nature of this job very much and I am proud to be a part of this highly ambitious Pan-European enterprise.