Máté Lengyel, Ph.D.

Máté Lengyel is professor of computational neuroscience in the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, and the Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University. Previously, he studied biology for his M.Sc. and neurobiology for his Ph.D. at Eötvös University in Budapest. He was then a postdoc at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London, followed by a visiting research fellowship at the Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study.

Lengyel is fascinated by the brain’s capacity to learn continuously about the environment and to use this knowledge flexibly to make predictions and guide its future decisions. His group studies learning and memory from computational, algorithmic/representational and neurobiological viewpoints. Computationally and algorithmically, his work uses ideas from Bayesian approaches to statistical inference and reinforcement learning to characterise the goals and mechanisms of learning in terms of normative principles and behavioural results.

Lengyel’s work also involves performing dynamical systems analyses of reduced biophysical and neural network models to understand the mapping of these algorithms into cellular and circuit mechanisms. His group collaborates very closely with experimental neuroscience groups, in vitro intracellular recordings, multi-unit recordings in behaving animals and human psychophysical and fMRI experiments.