The lack of research funding or a suitable job offer forced me to abandon my academic career. You are still very welcome to build on my research results.

Research interests:
The interfaces of mathematical (esp. probabilistic) modelling, stochastic processes, statistics, machine learning, chemical reaction kinetics, systems biology, control theory, operations research. I seek novel possibilities how these can be applied to develop quantitative methods for research in the life sciences. I'm also interested in making a positive societal impact with my research, and I'm open to being contacted with interesting project ideas for consultation (currently I work as a freelance applied mathematician).

Previous appointments:

• I was based at the Centre for Biological Systems Analysis (ZBSA) and tangentially at the Department of Mathematical Stochastics, both at the University of Freiburg, Germany. My host was Prof. Peter Pfaffelhuber.
• In Freiburg, I was most recently an AXA Research Fund postdoctoral fellow.
• I was visiting the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge, UK, from January until June 2016. (Even in this period, the AXA Research Fund fellowship provided my income.)
• I came to Freiburg with a Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.
• Before that, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara. I worked with Profs. Mustafa Khammash (Dept. of Mechanical Engineering) and João P. Hespanha (Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering).

Education:

• I defended my doctoral thesis in January 2011 at the University of Oxford, UK. I was with the Department of Statistics and the Life Sciences Interface Doctoral Training Centre as a member of Keble College. I worked under the supervision of Prof. Alison Etheridge (Dept. of Statistics) and Dr. Antonis Papachristodoulou (Control Group, Dept. of Engineering Science).
• I have an MSc degree (incl. undergrad studies) in mathematics from the Mathematical Institute of the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest, Hungary.

• Curriculum vitae (PDF)
• Citations to my publications, provided by Google Scholar Citations.

Publications -

1. Felix Beck, Bence Mélykúti
   Parameter estimation in a subcritical percolation model with colouring
   Stochastics: An International Journal of Probability and Stochastic Processes, 91(5), 657–694, 2019. External link (open access) | PDF | arXiv:1604.08908 [math.ST], 2017. External link | Software
2. Bence Mélykúti, Peter Pfaffelhuber
   The stationary distribution of a Markov jump process glued together from two state spaces at two vertices
   Stochastic Models, 31(4), 525–553, 2015. External link | PDF | arXiv:1401.6400 [math.PR], 2015. External link
3. Bence Mélykúti, João P. Hespanha, Mustafa Khammash
   Equilibrium distributions of simple biochemical reaction systems for time-scale separation in stochastic reaction networks
   Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 11(97), 20140054, 2014. External link (open access) | PDF, S1 (PDF), S2 (Mathematica notebook), S3 (Mathematica notebook)
4. Bence Mélykúti, Kevin Burrage, Konstantinos C. Zygalakis
   Fast stochastic simulation of biochemical reaction systems by alternative formulations of the chemical Langevin equation
   Journal of Chemical Physics, 132, 164109, 2010. External link | PDF
5. Bence Mélykúti, Elias August, Antonis Papachristodoulou, Hana El-Samad
   Discriminating between rival biochemical network models: three approaches to optimal experiment design
   BMC Systems Biology, 4:38, 2010. External link (open access) | PDF
6. István Miklós, Bence Mélykúti, Krister Swenson
   The metropolized Partial Importance Sampling MCMC mixes slowly on minimum reversal rearrangement paths
   IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, 7(4), 763–767, 2010. External link 1 | External link 2

Doctoral thesis, MSc dissertation and longer papers -

• Theoretical advances in the modelling and interrogation of biochemical reaction systems: alternative formulations of the chemical Langevin equation and optimal experiment design for model discrimination (PDF) | External link
  DPhil (PhD) thesis, 2010. Supervisors: Prof. Alison Etheridge, Dr. Antonis Papachristodoulou.
• Alternative formulations and moment estimates for the chemical Langevin equation (PDF), a list of errata with important corrections (PDF), and the alternative formulations part on poster (PDF)
  Dissertation for transfer to DPhil student status (Transfer report), 2009. Supervisors: Prof. Alison Etheridge, Dr. Antonis Papachristodoulou.
• A control theoretical approach to designing optimal experiments in systems biology (PDF)
  The write-up of the eight-week-long LSI DTC autumn project, 2007. Supervisor: Dr. Antonis Papachristodoulou.
• Prediction of hematopoietic cell transplantation success from HLA matching (PDF), and the same on poster (PDF)
  The write-up of the eight-week-long LSI DTC summer project, 2007. Supervisor: Prof. Gil McVean.
• The mixing rate of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods and some applications of MCMC simulation in bioinformatics (PDF)
  MSc dissertation for the degree mathematician, 2006. Supervisor: Dr. István Miklós.

Acknowledgements of my help +  -

1. Sebastian Ohse, Melanie Boerries, Hauke Busch
   Blind normalization of public high-throughput databases
   PeerJ Computer Science, 5:e231, 2019. External link (open access)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We thank Bence Mélykúti for comments that improved the manuscript. Melanie Boerries and Hauke Bush are designated equal last authors due to a shared research group at the time of this work.
2. Levente Szántó, Yukang Feng, Fan Zhong, Timo Hees, Evelyne van Ruymbeke, Rolf Mülhaupt, Christian Friedrich
   Ultra-broad molecular weight distribution effects on viscoelastic properties of linear multimodal PE
   Journal of Rheology, 63(5), 773–784, 2019. External link
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
L.Sz., Y.F., F.Z., T.H., R.M., and C.F. are grateful to BMBF for financial support within the CATEFF project. L.Sz. thanks Dr. B. Mélykúti for the valuable discussions. E.V.R. is chercheur qualifie of the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS).
3. Saul C. Leite, Ruth J. Williams
   A constrained Langevin approximation for chemical reaction networks
   Annals of Applied Probability, 29(3), 1541-1608, 2019. External link
Acknowledgments. We are grateful to Paul Dupuis for permitting us to include elements of a private communication with him, relating to a modification of the uniqueness argument given in [5]. We would also like to thank Bence Melykuti for helpful feedback, as well as an Associate Editor and two anonymous referees for constructive comments and suggestions, on the first version of this paper.
4. E. Hingant and R. Yvinec
   Deterministic and stochastic Becker–Döring equations: past and recent mathematical developments
   In: Stochastic processes, multiscale modeling, and numerical methods for computational cellular biology, Ed.: David Holcman, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2017. External link
In fact, the state space X_M is given by all possible partitions of the integer M, a well-known problem in combinatorics. In particular, one can show the recurrence formula and the asymptotic as M → ∞, Flajolet and Sedgewick (2009, Chap. I.3)¹…
¹R. Yvinec thanks Bence Melykuti for pointing out this fact.
5. Manoj Gopalkrishnan
   A scheme for molecular computation of maximum likelihood estimators for log-linear models
   In: DNA computing and molecular programming; 22nd International Conference, DNA 22; Munich, Germany, September 4--8, 2016; Proceedings, 3-18, 2016. External link
Acknowledgements
I thank Nick S. Jones, Anne Shiu, Abhishek Behera, Ezra Miller, Thomas Ouldridge, Gheorghe Craciun, and Bence Melykuti for useful discussions.
6. Martin Jansen, Peter Pfaffelhuber
   Stochastic gene expression with delay
   Journal of Theoretical Biology, 364(issue), 355–363, 2015. External link
Acknowledgments
We thank Bence Melykuti for helpful comments on the manuscript.
7. J. Goutsias, G. Jenkinson
   Markovian dynamics on complex reaction networks
   Physics Reports, 529(2), 199–264, 2013. External link
Acknowledgments
This research was supported in part by the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program through the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship 32 CFR 168a, and in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Grants CCF-0849907 and CCF-1217213. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The authors are grateful to B. Mélykúti for reading the manuscript and for providing helpful suggestions.
8. Marc Abrahams
   Medics subject Playboy magazine to 'peer review'
   The Guardian, Monday, 29 Oct 2012, 16.30 GMT. External link (open access)
(Thanks to Bence Mélykúti for bringing this to my attention.)

Supervision -

• Felix Beck
  Parameter estimation in a percolation model with coloring (PDF)
  MSc dissertation in mathematics, 2015.
• Bernadette (Benny) Lies
  The global attractor conjecture in the chemical reaction network theory (PDF)
  MSc dissertation (Diplomarbeit) in mathematics, 2014.

Coursework +

• Monte Carlo bounding techniques for determining solution quality in stochastic programs, in Hungarian (PDF)
  Slides of my talk held at the Simulation course (lecturer: Csaba Fábián) on 10^th May 2005. This is a summary of a paper written by Wai-Kei Mak, David P. Morton, R. Kevin Wood, in Operations Research Letters 24 (1999).
• A quadratically convergent polynomial algorithm for solving entropy optimization problems, in Hungarian (PDF)
  Slides of my talk given at the Continuous Optimization Seminar on 21^st April 2005. This is a summary of a paper written by Florian Potra and Yinyu Ye, in SIAM J. Optimization Vol. 3, No. 4, November 1993.
• Young-programming, in Hungarian (PDF)
  Slides of my talk that was held at the Selected topics in continuous optimization course (lecturer: Tibor Illés) on 5^th April 2005.

Miscellaneous -

• A program for computing the distance of two points on the surface of Earth
  A useful tool for GPS-users.
• My Erdős number is 3.
• Transcript (PDF)
  from the Life Sciences Interface Doctoral Training Centre, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, 2006-2007.
• Transcript (PDF)
  from the MSc (mathematician), Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary, 2001-2006.
• [Most recent update: 12^th November 2020]
• [Personal pages, other interests]