András Vukics is a senior research fellow at Wigner RCP. Early on in his career with a statistical-physics background, he studied the statistical aspects of cavity cooling and trapping of neutral atoms. He was the originator of the idea of spatial pattern-formation dynamical phase transitions in cavity QED, and author of one of the seminal papers in the field. From 2006, as a postdoctoral fellow at Innsbruck University, he studied the quantum aspects of particle motion in electromagnetic fields, emphasizing the role of atom-field entanglement. Inspired by these studies, he started to develop C++QED: a framework for simulating open quantum dynamics. In the 2010’s his attention turned towards ultrastrong light-matter coupling. In this field, he made fundamental contributions to the debate concerning the superradiant phase transition in atomic media. He numerically proved that the photon blockade breakdown turns into a first order quantum phase transition in a well-defined thermodynamic limit. Since 2016, he has also been taking part in the coordination of the experimental quantum-optics activities at Wigner RCP. Twice he has been awarded the Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.