Máté Szakáli completed his higher education at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest, Hungary. In International Studies he obtained a bachelor’s degree with honors in 2011, and a master’s degree with honors in 2014. As part of his master’s program, he studied Southeast Asian security policy, regionalism, and economy at the Faculty of International and Political Science of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland.
Since 2015, he has been an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Hungary. Between 2015 and 2021, he worked as a Research Associate at the Modern East Asia Research Group of Pázmány Péter Catholic University, at which he is currently an Associate Research Fellow. Since November 2022, he has been a researcher at the Eurasia Center of John von Neumann University, Hungary.
His major fields of research include Indonesian foreign policy, international relations of Southeast Asian nations, and regionalism and integration in Southeast Asia.