Mária Bartek-Lesi is a research associate at the Regional Center for Energy Policy Research (REKK). From 2000 until 2012 she was a teaching assistant and later an assistant professor at the Institute of Business Economics at the Corvinus University of Budapest. Previously, she participated in the work of the Department of Economics and Environmental Protection of the Hungarian Energy Office, and worked as a research assistant at the Labor Project of the Economics Department of the Central European University. She received her PhD in 2005 from the Faculty of Business Administration of the Corvinus University of Budapest. She holds an M.A. in Economics from the Central European University, Prague, and a degree in agricultural mechanical engineering from the University of Agricultural Sciences, Gödöllő.