Eörs Szathmáry studied biology at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. After finishing his PhD, he served as a research fellow at Eötvös University (Budapest), later becoming professor and head of the Department of Plant Taxonomy and Ecology. He served as a permanent fellow of the Collegium Budapest (Institute for Advanced Study, 1995-2011). Since 2011, he has directed the Parmenides Center for the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the Parmenides Foundation in Pöcking, Germany. His research topics include major evolutionary transitions, the origins of life and the genetic code, the emergence of the human language faculty, levels and mechanisms of biological cooperation, Darwinian neurodynamics, open-ended evolution, and the threats of evolutionary AI. He is a Guest Professor at the Department of Evolutionary Biology, Faculty of Biology, Ludwig-Maximilians University (LUM), Munich. His books have been published in a dozen languages.

Prizes: New Europe Prize for Higher Education and Research (1996), Academy Prize (1999), Széchenyi Prize (2017), Lifetime Achievement Award of the Evolutionary Linguistic Association (2024).

He is a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences of the US, the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters, the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts, Academia Europaea, and EMBO.