Julianna was born and raised in Budapest, Hungary. She attended Veres Pálné Gimnázium, the first school of secondary education for girls in Hungary established in 1869, and upon graduation she received the Veres Pálné Medallion, named after the founder of the school, who was an ardent defender of women’s rights.
Julianna obtained her M.Sc. degree in bioengineering from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME) in 2002 and followed her Ph.D. studies there as well in the computational chemistry group led by Prof. Tamás Veszprémi in the Deparment of Inorganic Chemistry. In 2006 she defended her Ph.D. thesis entitled „Theoretical study on the structure, reactivity and stability of silylenes and silenes”.
After a useful and happy period of working in the Drug Development Laboratory of Richter Gedeon Plc., she was a Marie Curie Research Fellow between 2007-2009 in the School of Chemistry at the University of Bristol (UK) in the group of Prof. Jeremy Harvey, where she familiarized with computational methods needed for the study of proteins and transition metal-containing systems.
She won a Marie Curie Re-Integration Grant and returned to Budapest in 2009. Since then she has worked in several positions in the Department of Inorganic and Analytical Chemistry of BME and won the Bolyai János Research Fellowship.
She is a co-organizer of the Virtual Winter School for Computational Chemistry since 2015, which is devoted to enabling scientists from all over the world, without restrictions on financial, health or family basis to listen to scientific lectures by prominent computational chemists (publication).
She is a committed Christian and a mother of three daughters, and was a breast-milk donor.
Julianna is passionately intrigued in learning new languages. She can freely speak in Hungarian, English and Dutch, she understands French and some Italian, and she is fond of Latin.
An interview with her can be read here (page 11). Hungarian interviews are also available here and here.