The Berényi Lab is committed to advance our understanding in how the healthy or diseased brain works. To progress toward our mission we focus on four main areas.

1. We perform RESEARCH using cutting edge methods to answer the intriguing state-of-the-art questions of fundamental neuroscience and the pathophysiology of certain brain related disorders. We understand the superiority of collaborative research over isolated laboratories, thus we continuously seeking for potent collaborators. To help the neuroscience communities we declare an open-access policy in our laboratory. We gratefully offer our datasets, scripts or tools to other laboratories for free of charge. We also happily invite researchers from other laboratories to visit us to get know each other, and to exchange knowhow and ideas.
2. We also invest our resources to DEVELOP NEW METHODS and TOOLS to enrich the inventory of modern neuroscience. We do this to readdress the open questions of brain research with more details or from a different perspective. We also search for alternative therapeutic approaches.
3. We encourage undergraduate and graduate students to join our research team by offering an interdisciplinary, cutting-edge TRAINING ENVIRONMENT, as well as COURSES AND JOURNAL CLUBS where they may gain an insight in the theoretical background of the research projects being performed, and can acquire the skill needed to work with our experiemntal models. Students may also get hands-on tutorials to build basic electronic circuits, or to analyze their data.
4. We support OUTREACH PROGRAMS to deliver the new results and success stories of our laboratory to the general public. We do this by issuing media releases, and by participating in conferences or other events organized for the broader audience.

Our research focuses currently on the following main fields:

1. We are investigating the possible therapeutic effects of Transcranial Electrical Stimulation (TES) on epileptic seizures. Particularly, we plan to develop a focused stimulation protocol both in time and space to interact only with the desired brain areas within an appropriate time-frame. To determine the appropriate focal points of stimulation, we investigate the internal dynamics of neural networks involved in seizure generation. We do this by performing a throughout analysis of networks on microscopic and mesoscopic scale with extremely high spatial and temporal resolution.
2. We are developing a closed-loop, implantable seizure suppressor device that continuously monitors the patterns of brain activity, and delivers electrical pulses in order to terminate any occurring seizures. We are hoping to translate our laboratory-stage experimental results into clinical trials within a few years.
3. In order to increase the spatial resolution and scale of our recording techniques we are working on increasing the channel count and recording site density on our silicon electrodes. To make a data-connection between these interfaces and the recording computer hardware, which doesn’t constrain the free behavior of our experimental models, we are seeking for high performance data-compression methods and wireless data transmission solutions.
4. In the field of fundamental science we are focusing on the role of hippocampus and related circuitries (included striatum) in memory formation and spatial navigation. We pay special interest to the role of sensory information in this field.