Róbert Tuba obtained his MSc degree (Environmental Engineering, 1998) and his PhD (2003) at University of Veszprém (now University of Pannonia, UP).
He spent one year as a researcher at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), where he conducted research in the fields of homogeneous catalysis and green chemistry. In 2003, he won an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship and spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Friedrich Alexander University, Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany.
Between 2005 and 2010, he continued his career in industrial R&D. He worked as a researcher in the field of pharmaceutical research and development at Richter Nyrt. He then worked for three years at GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals as a process development supervisor.
From 2011, he worked at Texas A&M University in Doha (Qatar) and College Station (Texas, USA) as assistant research scientist. In 2012, he joined the research group of Prof. Robert H. Grubbs, who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2005 for his research in the field of metathesis. He was working four years partly at the California Institute of Technology (CALTECH) in Grubbs’ laboratory in the United States as visiting associate scientist and partly at the Texas A&M University campus in Qatar. In 2015, he moved back to Hungary, founded his own research group, and began his independent career.
In 2022, he worked at the YALE University in the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering as Fulbright Scholar. In the same year, he won a Humboldt research grant in the frame of Alexander von Humboldt Research Linkage Program in Germany.
He obtained his DSc degree and became scientific advisor at Hungarian Research Network (HUN-REN), Research Centre for Natural Science (RCNS) in 2024. He is the scientific leader of the Chemical and Mechanical Utilization Project of the Waste Management Competence Center of the University of Pannonia. He is the Hungarian representative of Pan-European Network on the Sustainable Valorization of Lignin (LignoCOST), member of the council of European Federation of Catalysis Societies (EFCATS) and the management advisory board of Technology Transfer Labs, TTL USA INC.
His main research interests are organometallic chemistry and homogeneous catalysis, including the development of new generation olefin metathesis catalysts and their green chemical applications. The most significant discovery of his research group includes the development of new generation BICAAC-Ru olefin metathesis catalyst systems that enable the “open loop” recycling of polyethylene via isomerization metathesis (ISOMET). This process makes possible the chemical recycling of persistent polyethylene plastic waste into propylene.
