2023 Sydney Brenner Medal Laudator
Biography
Since 1 May 2023 Professor Balázs Gulyás is the President of the Hungarian Research Network (HUN-REN) while he is a Professor of Translational Neuroscience at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine (LKCMedicine), and Director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Centre at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Prior to thiese appointments in 2013, he spent most of his scientific career at the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden, where he is still a Professor in the Department for Psychiatry, Division of Clinical Neuroscience.
Balázs studied medicine at Semmelweis Medical University, and parallel with it followed courses in physics at Eötvös Loránd University in his native Budapest. After having obtained his MD degree in 1981, he left Hungary in the pursuit of further studies at the University of Cambridge, followed by the Catholic University of Leuven (BA and MA in Philosophy). He obtained his PhD in Neurobiology at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, in 1988, followed by his postdoctoral studies at the Department of Clinical Neurophysiology of the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, and at the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. During his career he participated in executive and leadership trainings at the universities of London, Oxford and the Harvard Business School. He also has a BD (divinity) from Heythrop College/University of London, a CHEMS (mathematics) from the Open University, Milton Keynes, and habilitations in medicine from the KULeuven, the Karolinska Institute and the University of Debrecen.
Balázs has published - as author or editor - fourteen books, authored over forty book chapters and 290+ research papers in peer reviewed scientific journals (source: Scopus and ORCID) and contributed to 7 patents in the fields of neuroscience. He is a member of, among others, Academia Europaea (where he is the Chair of the Section of Physiology and Neuroscience), the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Royal Belgian Academy of Medical Sciences and the Advanced Grants Panel of the European Research Council. Concurrent with his appointments he is an Honorary Professor and Senior Clinical Lecturer at the Division of Brain Sciences, Department of Medicine, Imperial College London, an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Radiology, Medical University Vienna, and an Adjunct Profesor at the James Cook University, Townsville.