István Katona, Ph.D.

Biography

István Katona is a neuroscientist, whose research aims to delineate the molecular architecture of endocannabinoid signaling in the brain, and to uncover the physiological and pathophysiological significance of this unusual messenger system in normal and abnormal brain activity with special focus on substance use disorders. He received his PhD in Neurosciences at the János Szentágothai Doctoral School of the Semmelweis Medical University of Budapest, Hungary in 2000. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany and as a visiting scientist at the Riken Brain Science Institute in Wako-shi, Japan. He received a European Research Council grant and a Welcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship to launch his research programs at Institute of Experimental Medicine in Budapest, Hungary in 2009. He worked there as the Head of the Department of Molecular and Developmental Neuroscience from 2011 until 2020 and serves as a senior consultant afterwards. He started the Addiction and Neuroplasticity laboratory at the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington in 2020, where he also holds the Naus Family Endowed Chair in Addiction Sciences. His main research contributions include the first electron microscopic evidence for the molecular organization of the retrograde endocannabinoid signaling pathway at chemical synapses, the synaptic circuit-breaker model on the role of endocannabinoid signaling in epilepsy and the development of STORM super-resolution imaging methodologies for cell- and compartment-specific nanoscale anatomical and pharmacological measurements in complex brain circuits. He was elected as a lifetime member of the Academy of Europe (Academia Europea) and EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organization) for his research accomplishments.