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. Upon graduation, she received the Veres Pálné Medallion, named after the founder of the school and a prominent defender of women's rights.
Julianna obtained her M.Sc. degree in bioengineering from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME) in 2002. She pursued her Ph.D. studies at the same university in the computational chemistry group led by Prof. Tamás Veszprémi. In 2006, she defended her Ph.D. thesis entitled "Theoretical study on the structure, reactivity and stability of silylenes and silenes."
After gaining valuable experience at the Drug Development Laboratory of Richter Gedeon Plc., she was a Marie Curie Research Fellow between 2007 and 2009 at the University of Bristol (UK) in the group of Prof. Jeremy Harvey. Here, she developed expertise in computational methods for studying proteins and transition metal-containing systems.
She received a Marie Curie Re-Integration Grant and returned to Budapest in 2009. Since then, she has held several positions at the Department of Inorganic and Analytical Chemistry at BME, where she also won the Bolyai János Research Fellowship.
Julianna is a co-organizer of the Virtual Winter School for Computational Chemistry since 2015, a platform enabling scientists worldwide to access lectures by prominent computational chemists without restrictions. (publication).
Julianna received the prestigious prize Nők a Tudományban Kiválósági Díj 2022 “Women in Science Excellence Prize” donated by the Association of Hungarian Women in Science (NaTE). The video filmed about her promoting science can be found here. The English translation of the transcript of the video can be found among the comments.
She is a committed Christian, a mother of three daughters, and a former breast-milk donor. Julianna is passionate about learning new languages, and she is fluent in Hungarian, English, and Dutch, with a strong understanding of French and Italian, as well as a fondness for Latin.
Interviews with Julianna can be found at the following links: