Dániel Róna, Ph.D. (1984), political scientist, the director of the 21 Research Center. He was the recipient of the Kolnai Aurél Prize in 2017 for his doctoral dissertation on the far-right party of Jobbik - which has also been published in a book format.

His special interests are research methodology, public opinion polling, and voter behaviour. He has several publications on these topics. Also, he taught at the Corvinus University of Budapest between 2009 and 2021. He studied in Rotterdam having gained an Erasmus Scholarship in 2007. He received the Sasakawa Scholarship in 2013. He was researching at Berkeley after gaining a Fulbright Scholarship in 2018. He obtained a three-year Premium Postdoctoral Scholarship at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, between 2017 and 2020.

He worked for the Hungarian Election Research Program in 2009, and a governmental background institution – Institute for Public Policy Research – from 2010 to 2012. He was the research director at the Action and Protection Foundation between 2016 and 2019. In 2017, he contributed to László Botka’s campaign and later worked on several occasions for Gergely Karácsony’s campaign. In 2021, he was part of Péter Márki-Zay’s campaign team, and in recent years, he has supported the work of the Momentum Movement.

Under his leadership, in 2024, the 21 Research Center conducted Hungary’s most accurate election survey ahead of the European Parliamentary elections, using a pioneering methodology introduced to the country for the first time.

He is an enthusiastic football fan: he regularly attends the matches of the Hungarian national team and a Budapest-based club, MTK. He also likes playing football, running, swimming, going to the gym and recently he also started orienteering. He is married. In January 2024, he welcomed the birth of his daughter, Zoé.