Professional Career
In 1963 Jerzy Buzek graduated from the Mechanics-and-Energy Division of the Silesian University of Technology, specialising in chemical engineering. He became a scientist in the Chemical Engineering Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Since 1997 he has been a professor of technical science. He is also an honorary doctor of the universities in Seoul and Dortmund.
From 1997 to 2001, Buzek was a coalition Prime Minister of Poland.
In 1998 he became the first laureate of the Grzegorz Palka Award and was nominated European of the Year by the European Union Business Chambers Forum.
In 1998 he was named Człowiek Roku, i.e., Person of the Year, by the influential Polish political weekly Wprost. He won the award for a second time in 2009. On receiving the award again, as President of the European Parliament, he stressed that he was the first winner to be honoured for his work beyond the borders of Poland.
He was the first Prime Minister of the 3rd Republic of Poland to serve a full term.
After losing the parliamentary elections in 2001, he stepped back from political life and focused more on his scientific work, becoming the prorector of Akademia Polonijna in Częstochowa and professor in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the Opole University of Technology in Opole.
His return to political life in 2004 saw him gain the largest popular vote in Poland as the member for Katowice to the European Parliament standing for the Civic Platform.
Whilst President of the European Parliament, on 30 March 2011, he was awarded an honorary fellowship of the IChemE at a meeting of the European Federation of Chemical Engineering (EFCE) in Brussels, Belgium.
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