The Language of Neurons15th & 16th September 2023, Barcelona

György BuzsákiSpeaker

Biggs Professor of Neuroscience at New York University, United States.

He is among the top 0.1% most-cited neuroscientists, member of the National Academy of Sciences USA, and member of Academia Europaea and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Professor Buzsáki sits on the editorial boards of several leading neuroscience journals, including Science and Neuron. He was a co-recipient of the 2011 Brain Prize and the winner of the Ralph W. Gerard Prize (2020; SFN’s highest honor), The Goldman-Rakic Prize (2021), The Ariëns Kappers Medal (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences), 2014; Krieg Cortical Discoverer Award from the American Association of Anatomists (2001). Professor Buzsáki also published the books Rhythms of the Brain (Oxford University Press, 2006) and The Brain from Inside Out (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Regarding his scientific achievements, Professor Buzsáki identified a hierarchical organisation of brain oscillations and proposed how such rhythms support a ‘brain syntax,’ a physiological basis of cognitive operations. His work changed the way we conceive information encoding in both the healthy brain and the diseased brain, under circumstances such as epilepsy and psychiatric diseases. Professor Buzsáki’s most influential work is known as the two-stage model of memory trace consolidation, where hippocampal sharp wave ripples serve as a transfer mechanism from the hippocampus to the neocortex. Several laboratories around the world have adopted his framework and provided supporting evidence for the two-stage model of memory in both experimental animals and human subjects. Over the years, the ‘ripple’ pattern has become a quantifiable biomarker for cognition. Relevant to clinical translation, hippocampal ripples, along with other brain rhythms that his laboratory has identified, lend themselves to the diagnosis of disease and the discovery of medications.