Balázs Péntek, a first-year PhD student at the Doctoral School of Physics at UBB, working under the supervision of Dr. Mária Ercsey-Ravasz, has achieved remarkable success by securing the 2nd prize at the Hungarian National Students Conference held in April, 2025 at Pécs, Hungary.
The title of his presentation was „Modeling the Drosophila connectome based on the exponential distance rule” and discussed how the underlying geometrical constraint of the brain, known as the exponential distance rule, affects the structure of the fruit fly brain network. One interesting property not explained by this geometrical rule was found to be the asymmetry of connection weights, considered to be important for the functional hierarchy of brain regions. He also attempted to construct this hierarchy using a novel approach. These highly innovative results were recently published in the Network Neuroscience scientific journal with impact factor 3.6. (B. Pentek, M. Ercsey-Ravasz; The exponential distance rule-based network model predicts topology and reveals functionally relevant properties of the Drosophila projectome. Network Neuroscience 2025; doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/netn_a_00455)
The Doctoral School of Physics congratulates Balázs Péntek on this outstanding milestone and looks forward to their continued success.