Gergely Tóth studied Chinese language at Beijing Foreign Studies Institute followed by university studies at the South China Agricultural University, where he received his first degree in soil science and agrochemistry. Next he completed the master course of the University of Manchester (UM) carried out at the Central European University and obtained an MSc in environmental sciences from the UM. He earned his PhD from the University of Veszprém (now University of Pannonia), where he started to work as a research associate at its Georgikon Faculty in Keszthely. He spent five months at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria and ten months at United Nations University, Institute of Advanced Studies as a PhD fellow and at the Laboratory for Landscape Planning of the University of Tokyo as a guest researcher.
From 2002 to 2005 he worked as a senior scientist at the Research Institute for Soil Sciences and Agrochemistry of the Hungarian Academy of Science. Meanwhile he held a part-time position as an adjunct professor in Keszthely.
Between 2005-2017 he worked at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in Ispra, Italy, responsible for development of soil quality indicator, furthermore, he was the scientific leader of the EU’s first unified soil survey program LUCAS-Soil, which became the soil monitoring of the EU.
After twelve years at the European Commission, he returned to Hungary and worked as a full professor and founding head of the Department of Soil Science and Environmental Informatics at the Georgikon Faculty of the University of Pannonia, while serving as a scientific advisor at the Institute for Soil Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Science.
He holds a Doctor of Science (DSc) degree from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and habilitation (Habilitation ad personam) from the University of Kaposvár.
He had been chairing the Agriculture-environment relationships division of the European Society for Agronomy, and was the vice chair of the Commission for soil evaluation and land use planning of International Union of Soil Sciences. He served as the founding European coordinator of the „Sino-EU Panel on Land and Soil” which he is currently a member of. Currently also a member of the Board of Program Managers of the European Joint Programming – SOIL and co-chair of the Research and Innovation Pillar of the European Soil Partnership (within the Global Soil Partnership of the United Nations).
He has been active in organising symposia and conferences, he is the chief organiser of the soil and land quality conference series. Gergely participated in and lead several domestic and international scientific research projects and consortia in the fields of soil science, soil fertility, soil degradation, land quality and land use. His list of publications is available here, and with Hungarian papers here.
Gergely joined the iASK in 2020.
