Associate Professor, Head of Departments, Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME)
Zsolt Szalay is an electrical engineer and economist, Head of the Department of Automotive Technologies at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME). He earned his degree in electrical engineering in 1995 and in economics in 1997 and completed his PhD in 2002 at BME. Between 2021 and 2023, he studied innovation management in the MIT REAP program. A member of the Hungarian Academy of Engineering since 2009, he joined its Board in 2023. He has been active in automotive innovation for over 30 years.
He began his career at Knorr-Bremse, working on electronically controlled braking systems, later becoming project manager for fourth-generation EBS systems. He then founded his own automotive research company. Today, telematics solutions from Inventure Automotive are used in over 1 million vehicles across 85 countries.
Between 2016 and 2023, he contributed to the planning and implementation of the ZalaZONE Automotive Test Track. A faculty member at BME since 2005, he has led the department since 2015. He founded and leads the BME Automated Drive Lab research group. His research focuses on automated vehicle control and combining virtual and physical testing methods for mobility systems.
