The Prime Minister appointed physician, neurobiologist Balázs Gulyás as the President of the Eötvös Loránd Research Network, effective May 1, 2023.
Balázs Gulyás returns to Hungary after 42 years to lead the Eötvös Loránd Research Network. As a researcher and science organizer he has accomplished remarkable achievements, emphasized János Csák, Minister of Culture and Innovation during the presentation of the appointment letter at the Carmelite Monastery.
Balázs Gulyás has been a Professor and President's Chair of Translational Neuroscience at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine (LKCMedicine), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, and the Director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Centre (CoNiC) of NTU since 2012.
On the occasion of his appointment, the new president said, “I am delighted to work with the leaders of the ELKH research sites, talented and dedicated researchers and the supporting staff. I am confident that by working together, sharing our ideas and leveraging our collective expertise, we can achieve outstanding results that will have a direct impact on the future of our country, the well-being and health of our fellow citizens, and our culture. Our performance will also contribute to the further development of universal science.”
Prior to this appointment as one of the founding professors of LKCMedicine and the inaugural chair of the School’s neuroscience and mental health programme, he spent most of his scientific career at the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden, where he is still a Professor in the Section for Psychiatry, Division of Clinical Neuroscience.
He studied medicine at Semmelweis Medical University (MD: 1981), and parallel with it followed courses in physics at Eötvös Loránd University in his native Budapest. He studied philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium (BA and MA, 1982 and 1984) and obtained his PhD in Neurobiology at the same university in 1988. He pursued his postdoctoral studies at the Department of Clinical Neurophysiology of the Karolinska Institute 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 (2020), a CHEMS (mathematics) from The Open University, Milton Keynes (2022), and habilitations in medicine from KU Leuven (1988), the Karolinska Institute (1997) and the University of Debrecen (1999).
Earlier in his career he made some pioneering contributions to the fields of visual neuroscience and the functional mapping of the human brain with positron emission tomography (PET). Later on, his interest turned to molecular neuroimaging with PET, with special regard to neurological and psychiatric diseases and their “humanised” animal disease models. These activities also involved biomarker target identifications as well as drug and diagnostic imaging probe development studies. His recent interest covers, among others, the fields of neurology, psychiatry, basic and cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging, in general, and more recently the neurobiological foundations of the human brain's extraordinary capacities, in particular.
Balázs Gulyás has published – as author or editor – fourteen books, authored some forty book chapters and 290+ research papers in peer reviewed scientific journals (source: Scopus and ORCID) and contributed to 7 patents. He is a member of, among others, Academia Europaea (The Academy of Europe – 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 until his appointment as the President of ELKH he was a member of the Advanced Grants Panel of the European Research Council. Concurrent with his appointments at LKCMedicine in Singapore and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, he is an Honorary Professor at the Division of Brain Sciences, Department of Medicine, Imperial College London.
His scientific achievements have been recognized with numerous awards and titles, including the Marie Curie Award (2001, 2005, European Association for Nuclear Medicine), the János Arany Medal (2005, The Hungarian Science Abroad Presidential Committee), the György Hevesi Award (2005, Hungarian Society of Nuclear Medicine), the Guilleme Budé Memorial Medal (2006, Collège de France), the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary (2007), the Dr. György Szabó Award (2012) and an honorary doctorate from the University of Debrecen.