Professor Zoltán Molnár

Professor of Developmental Neuroscience

Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics

01865 (2)82664

zoltan.molnar@dpag.ox.ac.uk

Zoltán Molnár is Professor of Developmental Neuroscience at the University of Oxford. He is known for key contributions to our understanding of how the birth of cortical neurons is regulated, how they migrate, differentiate, generate axons and assemble into circuits, and how those circuits change over time, partly as a result of activity passing through them.

Molnár earned his M.D. at the Albert Szent-Györgyi Medical University, Szeged, Hungary and D.Phil. at the University of Oxford, UK. He also investigated thalamocortical development working at the Institut de Biologie Cellulaire et de Morphologie, Université de Lausanne, Switzerland, and learned optical recording techniques to understand early functional thalamocortical interactions at Kyoto Prefectural School of Medicine, Japan.

He was appointed to a University Lecturer position at the Department of Human Anatomy and Genetics at Oxford associated with an Official Fellowship and Tutorship at St John's College from 2000. He was awarded the title Professor of Developmental Neuroscience in 2007. Molnar has been Elected Member of Academia Europaea (Physiology and Neuroscience); European Neonatal Brain Club; Fellow of the Anatomical Society, Awarded New Fellow of the Year Award for 2018.

Department of Physiology, Anatomy, and Genetics

St John's College

ORCiD

Twitter

Selected Publications

Zoltán has also written many highly accessible articles on the lives of scientists including Charles Sherrington, Thomas Willis, Ivan Pavlov and Santiago Ramon y Cajal.

Molnár Z (2004) Thomas Willis (1621-1675), the founder of clinical neuroscience. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 5(4):329-35.
Molnár Z and Brown RE (2010) Insights into the life and work of Sir Charles Sherrington. Timeline. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 11(6):429-36.
De Carlos JA, Molnár Z. (2019) Cajal's interactions with Sherrington and The Croonian Lecture. Anat Rec (Hoboken). doi: 10.1002/ar.24189. [Epub ahead of print]
Lorusso L, Piccolino M, Motta S, Gasparello A, Barbara JG, Bossi-Régnier L, Shepherd GM, Swanson L, Magistretti P, Everitt B, Molnár Z, Brown RE. Neuroscience without borders: Preserving the history of neuroscience. Eur J Neurosci. 2018 Sep;48(5):2099-2109.
Brown RE, Molnár Z, Filaretova L, Ostrovsky M, Piccolino M, Lorusso L. The 100th Anniversary of the Russian Pavlov Physiological Society. Physiology (Bethesda). 2017 Nov;32(6):402-407.

Research

Our laboratory fosters communicating science to the public while encouraging and empowering young scientists to take part in public engagement themselves. Professor Molnár uses a variety of different engagement media including open digital resources, public exhibitions and lectures to reach the widest possible audience.

Zoltán has a particular interest in the history of neuroscience and is enthusiastic about putting historical material in context so that people can understand its relevance today.

Together with Dr Damion Young, he was co-founder and editor of the History of Medicine website for the University of Oxford. This website contains videos of 19 history of neuroscience lectures that he organised and recorded and 7 further lectures of the Symposium on the History of Understanding of the Cerebral Cortex, that he organised at St John’s College, Oxford.

Through this website, he has also pioneered making historical scientific artefacts and instruments available to the public through a number of digital projects. These include a project funded by the Wellcome Trust and FENS to make the contents of Charles Sherrington’s slide box and Le Gros Clark’s neuroanatomy teaching slides available to the public.

This website also includes digitised objects, instruments and documents. Of particular note are a series of 360 scanned objects and instruments that can be rotated and examined by the public online. The site also provides open access to collections of scans of letters between famous neuroscientists including Sherrington, Eccles, Cushing, Florey, Ruffini and Pavlov.

Zoltán has also written many highly accessible articles on the lives of scientists including Charles Sherrington, Thomas Willis, Ivan Pavlov and Santiago Ramon y Cajal.

Publications

Teaching

Current DPhil students in my group

I am very enthusiastic about medical education. My departmental teaching contributes to the pre-clinical training of medical and biomedical students. I give lectures and seminars in the 1st BM course mainly in the field of neurosciences; on the anatomy and development of the human central nervous system. Since 2000, I have been organizing the neuroanatomy practical classes for 2nd year medical students and contributing with more specialized lectures and seminars for the FHS (3rd year medical students) and M.Sc. Degree in Neuroscience Course. I also teach on the Principles of Clinical Anatomy Course for 3rd year medics. I have been representing Neuroscience in the Departmental Teaching Committee since 2009. I was awarded the Medical Sciences Teaching Excellence Award in 2010.

In the Media

Professor Zoltán Molnár

Head of Cerebral Cortical Development and Evolution Group