In March 2015, Szalay was named a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University for his accomplishments as an interdisciplinary researcher and excellence in teaching.

[17] The following year, he received Hungary's Széchenyi Prize, which recognizes “those who have made an outstanding contribution to academic life in Hungary.”[18] Szalay was recognized in particular for his “discovery of the large scale (400 million light years) distribution pattern of galaxies.”[6] In 2003, he was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Szalay is an astrophysicist who has made significant contribution to our understanding of the structure formation and on the nature of the dark matter in the universe.

A minor planet discovered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey at Apache Point Observatory was named 170010 Szalay in his honor.

[23] Szalay is a leader in the grass-roots standardization effort to bring the next generation petascale databases in astronomy to a common basis, so that they will be interoperable.

[24] In 2001, Jim Gray and Szalay wrote up a viewpoint article on the national virtual observatory project for Science, entitled "The World-Wide Telescope.

"[25] He was also one of the founders of the International Virtual Observatory Alliance and part of the core team to build the Galaxy Zoo,[26][27] one of the most visible citizen science projects today.

He has collaborated on high-speed data analytics for more than a decade, and has been part of the TeraFlow project[30] since 2004 [31] and the Open Science Grid.

[39][40] The Data-Scope went online in 2013 and read “data 30 times faster than GrayWulf, making it the fastest data-processing system at any university in the world.”[15] Szalay has more recently branched out in other scientific areas focusing on data-intensive computing.

[42] With Andreas Terzis and Katalin Szlavecz, he has built an end-to-end wireless sensor system for in-situ monitoring of environmental parameters, including CO2, and measuring the impact of the soil on the global carbon cycle.

[44] Szalay has also become heavily involved in applying modern data-intensive computational techniques to genomics, in collaboration with Steven Salzberg, Ben Langmead, Sarah Wheelan, and Richard Wilton.