Neurobiologist Tamás Freund was born in 1959 in Zirc. He earned his biologist’s diploma from Eötvös Loránd University of Sciences in 1983. He is an internationally acknowledged scholar of the cortex, director of the MTA’s Experimental Medical Research Institute. He acquired the Doctor of the academy title in 1992. The MTA elected him as a corresponding member in 1998 and as an ordinary member in 2004. His outstanding scientific results have been recognized by many prestigious prizes at home and abroad.

Together with two other Hungarian academicians, György Buzsáki and Péter Somogyi, he was decorated with the 2011 Brain Prize, the Nobel Prize of brain research, for his research results of the organization and functions of the cortex and the hyppocampus, the latter of key importance in processes of learning and memory. Tamás Freund is president of the consortium of the National Brain Research Program, started in 2014 with 12 billion HUF of budgetary resource.