Prof. Székely graduated from the Technical University of Budapest in chemical engineering in 1974 and from the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest in Applied Mathematics in 1981. He obtained his Ph.D. in analytical chemistry in 1985 from the Technical University of Budapest. Between 1974 and 1986 he has been working at the Computer Department of the Institute of Isotopes of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, since 1985 as the Head of the Department, focusing on automatic structure elucidation of organic compounds. Between 1986 and 1990 he developed computer support systems for the chemical and biomedical applications of magnetic resonance at Bruker Spectrospin. In 1991 he joined the Computer Vision Laboratory of the ETH Zurich as a senior researcher. In 2002 he was elected as Associate Professor at the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering and founded the Medical Image Analysis and Visualization research group. He has been promoted to Full Professor in 2008. Between 2001 and 2013 he has been the Director of the Swiss National Center for Competence in Research on Computer Aided and Image Guided Medical Interventions. In 2007 he co-founded the spinoff company Virtamed, producing virtual reality based system for surgical training. His major research interest is developing algorithms and clinical systems for the optimal computer support of medical diagnosis, therapy, training and education.
