Zoltán Hajnal earned his Ph.D. in physics at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME, 2001) investigating the morphological and electronic structure of light-emitting porous silicon devices. From 1997 he was a research fellow at the Institute for Technical Physics and Materials Science (MFA) of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) until the end of 2020. On leave from MFA, he was a guest researcher at the Central Michigan University (Mt. Pleasant, MI) in collaboration with the Naval Research Laboratories (Washington, DC). In 1997, he joined the theoretical physics group developing DFTB as a post-doctoral fellow (1997-2003) at the University of Paderborn (Germany) where he studied the chemical and electronic properties of various defects in bulk semiconductors and insulators, as well as at their surfaces and interfaces. He taught atomic and molecular modelling and simulation at regular courses in Paderborn and as an invited lecturer at the City University of Hong Kong. At MFA in Hungary he contributed to the development, simulation, and design optimization of various MEMS and various microfluidic devices. In May 2023 he joined the Institute for Microelectronics at TU Wien to investigate the behaviour and electronic properties of point defects in candidate materials for "next-generation" nanoelectronic devices.