Zóltan Cséfalvay is minister of state for economic strategy at the Ministry for National Economy of Hungary. He started an academic career as a research fellow at the Institute for Geography of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1983. In 1990, he was hired to head the cabinet of the Minister of Industry. In 1991, he became an advisor to the president of the Hungarian National Bank. After the 1994 elections, he returned to the academic world, to lead the Hungarian Centre of Trend Research, a Budapest-based research institute focused on economics and technology. During the same period, he was a Humboldt fellow at the University of Heidelberg, in the department of geography, and from 1997 to 1999, he was a research fellow at the Institute for Urban and Regional Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. In 1998, he started lecturing at the Kodolányi János College, Székesfehérvár. In 2000, he was appointed deputy secretary of state for regional economic development, a post he held until 2002. After the 2002 election, he left government and became a professor of economic geography at the Andrássy Gyula German University of Budapest, a position he still holds. After the 2010 election, he returned to government as a minister of state in charge of economic strategy. During the Hungarian presidency of the Council of the EU, he chairs the competitiveness council. He holds a degree in historygeography (1982), a PhD (1986), a C.Sc. degree (1996) and a habilitated doctoral degree in earth sciences (1999) from the Kossuth Lajos University of Debrecen. He also won a scholarship to pursue graduate courses at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität in Munich (1987).