Rate My Professor Bence Olveczky

Bence P. Ölveczky is Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. Originally trained as a mechanical engineer, he received an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the Technical University of Budapest in 1994, an M.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Imperial College London in 1996, and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience and Medical Engineering/Medical Physics from Harvard University and MIT in 2003 under Prof. Markus Meister. He remained at Harvard for postdoctoral research (2003-2004), then served as a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows (2004-2007) while working with Prof. Michale Fee at MIT. Ölveczky joined the Harvard faculty as Assistant Professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology in 2007, advanced to John L. Loeb Associate Professor in the Natural Sciences in 2012, and was promoted to full Professor in 2016.

The Ölveczky Lab investigates the principles and mechanisms by which neural circuits in the mammalian brain acquire, learn, and generate complex behaviors, both innate and learned. Employing rats as a tractable model organism, the lab utilizes a suite of advanced techniques including fully automated high-throughput behavioral training systems, continuous long-term neural recordings, high-resolution 3D behavioral tracking, optogenetics, pharmacogenetics, and sophisticated computational analyses. In collaboration with DeepMind, the lab has developed a biomechanically realistic virtual rodent driven by artificial neural networks that recapitulates diverse rat behaviors. Key findings delineate the distinct contributions of motor cortex, basal ganglia, striatum, and thalamic inputs to motor skill learning and execution, including how the brain decouples learning from performance, regulates kinematic variability, and handles flexible versus automatic movements. Ölveczky's contributions have profoundly shaped systems neuroscience. He has garnered major awards such as the Sloan Fellowship (2009), McKnight Scholar Award (2008), Klingenstein Fellowship (2008), Mind Brain Behavior Faculty Award (2014), Distinguished Kavli Lecturer (2015), and Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative Consortium 2.0 Award (2025). Representative publications include 'Motor cortex is required for learning but not for executing a motor skill' (Neuron, 2015), 'Acute off-target effects of neural circuit manipulations' (Nature, 2015), 'The role of motor cortex in motor sequence execution depends on demands for flexibility' (Nature, 2024), and 'A virtual rodent predicts the structure of neural activity across behaviours' (Nature, 2024).