Réka Albert (born 2 March 1972^[1]) is a Romanian-Hungarian scientist. She is a distinguished professor of physics and adjunct professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University^[2][3] and is noted for the Barabási–Albert model and research into scale-free networks and Boolean modeling of biological systems.

Albert was born in Reghin, a city in Mureș County, located in the historical region of Transylvania, in the north-central part of Romania. She obtained her B.S. and M.S. degrees from Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, in 1995 and 1996, respectively. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame in 2001.^[3]

Albert is co-creator, together with Albert-László Barabási, of the Barabási–Albert model for generating scale-free random graphs via preferential attachment (see Barabási–Albert model).

Her work extends to networks in a very general sense, involving for instance investigations on the error tolerance and attack vulnerability of complex networks^[4] and its applications to the vulnerability of the North American power grid.^[5][6]

Her current research focuses on dynamic modeling of biological networks and systems biology.

Albert was selected as a Sloan Research Fellow in 2004 and was awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2007. She was named Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2010.^[7] One year later she received the Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award.^[2][8] In 2016 she was inducted as an external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.^[9] She was elected Fellow of the Network Science Society in 2018^[10] and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2019.^[11]

• Albert R., Barabási A.-L.: Statistical mechanics of complex networks, Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 74, Nr. 1, pp. 47–97, 2002, doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.74.47, arXiv:cond-mat/0106096v1 (submitted 6 June 2001)
• Jeong H., Tombor B., Albert R., Oltvai Z.N., Barabási A.-L.: The large-scale organization of metabolic networks, Nature 407, pp. 651–654, 2000, doi:10.1038/35036627 arXiv:cond-mat/0010278 (submitted 19 October 2000)
• Albert R., Jeong H., Barabási A.-L.: Error and attack tolerance of complex networks, Nature 406, pp. 378–382, 2000, doi:10.1038/35019019, arXiv:cond-mat/0008064v1 (submitted 3 August 2000)
• Barabási A.-L., Albert R.: Emergence of scaling in random networks, Science, Vol. 286, Nr. 5439, pp. 509–12, 15 October 1999, doi:10.1126/science.286.5439.509, arXiv:cond-mat/9910332v1 (submitted 21 October 1999)