György Buzsáki

György Buzsáki identified a hierarchical organization of brain oscillations and proposed how these rhythms support a ‘brain syntax’, a physiological basis of cognitive operations. His work changed how we think about information encoding in the healthy and diseased brain, such as epilepsy and psychiatric diseases. His most influential work is known as the two-stage model of memory trace consolidation, with hippocampal sharp wave ripples serving as a transfer mechanism from hippocampus to neocortex. Several laboratories worldwide 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 of cognition. Relevant to clinical translation, hippocampal ripples, along with other brain rhythms that his laboratory has identified, lend themselves to diagnosis of disease and drug discovery.

Buzsáki is Biggs Professor of Neuroscience at New York University. He is among the top 0.1% most-cited neuroscientists, member of the National Academy of Sciences USA, member of Academia Europaea and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He sits on the editorial boards of several leading neuroscience journals, including Science and Neuron. He is 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), and Krieg Cortical Discoverer Award from the American Association of Anatomists (2001).