Prof. György Buzsáki has published more than 400 papers and is among the top 1% most-cited neuroscientists. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, Academia Europaea, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He sits on the editorial boards of several leading neuroscience journals. His main interest is neural syntax, that is the rules by which neuronal messages are segmented and read out.
Transcranial electrical stimulation is a popular method to boost memory or treat neuropsychiatric diseases, but we still don’t completely understand how neurons can respond to externally induced electric fields. As an MD, I am trying to focus on how the findings of basic research can be utilized in clinical applications. I use high-density extracellular recordings in rodents and EEG in humans during stimulation.
My main scientific interest is understanding how different brain regions communicate with each other during various brain states and behaviors. By combining large-scale single-unit electrophysiology and optogenetics in freely behaving mice, my research explores the interaction between the midline thalamus and the ventral subiculum. I earned my PhD in Biology from the University of Szeged, Hungary.
My core interest are the brain mechanisms that enable the integration of new, unique experiences into a framework of preexisting knowledge and allow us to form an abstract, internal model of the world. This fascination has developed over the course of my training to become an MD and subsequent studies
to obtain a PhD in Biology at the University of Freiburg, Germany. In my previous research, I have applied a broad range of techniques, including patch-clamp recordings, electron microscopy and two-photon imaging of the mouse hippocampus in virtual environments to investigate the mechanisms that
allow the representation and storage of abstract information in hippocampal networks. Currently, I perform high-density electrophysiological recordings to investigate learning-related changes of single-cell activity and synaptic connectivity in the hippocampus. In addition, I’m completing residency training in Adult Psychiatry at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine.
When I’m not in the lab or clinic, I am involved in the organization of the ElMaMa kindergarten project in Watamu, Kenya. Check out our work under www.elmamakindergarten.org!
The biggest motivation for my research have always been my patients. During my residency in Neurosurgery at the University Hospital in Erlangen, I more than once stumbled across their questions about the pathologies that afflict them and their brains. My particular curiosity lies in the electrical activity patterns in the medial temporal lobe, which are underlying memories about the world around us, but can also lead to devastating epileptic seizures. Coming from a background of electronics and automation, in which I trained prior to enrolling in medical school, I have always been curious to understand the bolts and wires of the hippocampal system. My current project aims to understand how the dentate gyrus gates physiologial and abnormal activity from the entorhinal cortex – and how to prevent it from letting seizures pass into the rest of the hippocampal formation.
Outside of the lab, I am a co-founder of the ElMaMa kindergarten project in Watamu, Kenya. Learn more about our work under www.elmamakindergarten.org!
The brain’s capacity to adaptively and autonomously restructure itself while disconnected from the world is critical for planning and remembering. My research focuses on how interactions between the hippocampus and the cortex during sleep restructure brain networks to support memory consolidation.
The hippocampus is conventionally viewed as the cortex’s instructor, triggering the reinstatement of waking cortical activity patterns during sleep. However, recent data indicate that the cortex plays an active role in these interactions, suggesting that the consolidation process is more like a dialogue than a rehearsal. Consequently, the mechanistic details of how the hippocampus and cortex jointly coordinate systems-wide reactivations during sleep are not yet known. In particular, it is not clear how this dialogue might support the integration of new information into existing schemas. I plan to address these questions using a combination of in vivo electrophysiology and widefield imaging of cortical activity to study experience-dependent changes in hippocampal-cortical interactions during sleep.
My long-term scientific interests and career have focused on understanding brain electrophysiology across levels, from ion channels and synapses to circuits and systems. I am particularly interested in how neuromodulators influence each level to synergistically regulate peripheral physiology (e.g., energy balance and metabolism) and motivated behaviors.
Gladwin is our lab manager with a Bachelors of Science degree in Biomolecular Science from NYU Tandon School of Engineering. The complexity of the human mind, the chorus of neural signals firing in and out of unison, leading to the behaviors we see daily first brought him towards the neuroscience field. Now he is interested in the current techniques used to track, record, and decipher neural signals, with the intent to develop and use brain-computer interfaces in the future.
Sam is a Ph.D. student rotating in the lab. He did his undergraduate at UChicago, studying math and philosophy. He is interested in the intersection between machine learning and neuroscience. He is fascinated with the comparisons between how the machine and the brain learn. He also enjoys applying and developing machine learning tools to make sense of neural data. He is currently working on unsupervised sequence detection.
Elisa is a graduate student in the lab. Before NYU, she completed a BSc and an MSc at UCL, where she worked on successor representation models of flexible planning in spatial tasks. She is interested in hippocampal-neocortical interactions and how synchronous brain states can support memory consolidation during sleep.
Nick is a MD/PhD student who recently joined the lab and is co-advised by Dr. Anli Liu. He works on the interaction between hippocampal physiology and metabolic functions as well as a few other projects together with Thomas.
Danielle Beam is a MD/PhD student in the lab. Prior to coming to NYU, she completed a BA in psychology at Stanford University, where she worked with human intracranial EEG data to study emotion, perception, and experiential phenomena of brain stimulation. After undergrad, she spent two years at Cedars-Sinai working with human single neuron data to understand mechanisms underlying error monitoring and the effects of seizures on memory neurons. She is currently interested in network dynamics, and how differences in networks influence differences in behavior, memory, and disease processes amongst groups and individual animals.
Brian is an MD/PhD student in the Buzsáki Lab. He grew up in Southern California, where he first developed a fascination with the hippocampus as a high school intern in the laboratory of Dr. Ted Berger at USC. He continued pursuing this interest as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University in the lab of Dr. Jim Knierim, where he studied how visual velocity and positional cues influence the rodent hippocampal place cell system and the thalamic head direction system using virtual reality. Currently, he is interested in hippocampal–neocortical interactions that support learning and memory consolidation, and on how these communication pathways break down in neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and epilepsy.
Biomedical Engineer focused on building computational systems and scalable data architectures for neuroscience. With a background in interdisciplinary research environments, my work centers on developing digital tools that streamline lab workflows, support data integration, and enable reproducible science. My core interest lies in transforming complex scientific datasets into accessible, actionable resources for the research community.
I recently completed a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology focusing on the neuroscience of psychology, during which time I worked in a lab looking at the behavioral effects of transcranial electrical stimulation. I’m interested in better understanding the physiological changes which arise from TES to better apply it therapeutically.
I completing my MS in Physics/Biology and working with Omid. The factors that affect animal behavior via changes in neural activity is a fascinating topic. I’m currently using electrophysiological analysis to investigate the effect of Physical movement on neural activity.
Angela is a Master’s student in Biology at NYU. She is interested in how sharp-wave ripples impact the mechanisms behind memory consolidation. She is currently working on high-density electrophysiological recordings with Mihaly.
