Bence Ölveczky is professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard University. His lab examines how the brain learns and generates complex behaviors, including motor skills. He and his team study this in rodents, generalist motor learners with the capacity to master a variety of different tasks. The lab has developed a unique experimental infrastructure to address these questions, including a fully automated high-throughput training system for rodents that can be combined with continuous long-term neural and behavioral recordings. They use this together with sophisticated circuit dissection tools to arrive at mechanistic descriptions of how the mammalian brain learns and executes motor skills.
A mechanical engineer by training, Ölveczky earned his Ph.D. in neuroscience at Harvard, working with Markus Meister on motion processing in the retina. As a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows, Ölveczky worked with Michale Fee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the neural mechanisms of vocal learning in songbirds.
