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The International Brain Bee (IBB) aims to spark students’ interest in and encourage them to pursue a career in neuroscience. The competition, which began in the United States in 1998, attracts 25,000 students from nearly 50 countries each year. The winners of the national rounds compete at the IBB World Championship.
Hungary joined the initiative in 2022, organized by the Centre for Neuroscience of the University of Pécs and the Hungarian Neuroscience Society. The University of Debrecen (UD) has also participated in it in the framework of the NeurotechEU program, not only as an organizer, but also as an active trainer of students.
This year’s event, like in previous years, consisted of a written and an oral round. The Debrecen preparatory district included 14 competitors. Among the local secondary schools, the UD Kossuth Lajos Secondary and Primary School and Fazekas Mihály Secondary School entered the competition.
The students were assisted in their preparation for the competition, which required complex thinking and high-level English language skills, by Péter Szücs, Director of the Institute of Anatomy, Histology and Embryology of the Faculty of Medicine of UD, Lídia Gömöri, a PhD student at the institution, and Zsolt Krakomperger, a subject teacher at the Kossuth Secondary School.
In addition to the teaching materials enriched with diagrams and explanations, they deepened the students’ knowledge through online classes, consultations, histology exercises, as well as a visit to the autopsy room and a presentation of anatomy materials.
“Before the written round, the participants studied the anatomy of the nervous system in the dissecting room of the Institute of Anatomy, and we presented the histological sections to them online. Out of the 39 participants in the written round, one of our students advanced to the oral round. It should be noted that the field was strong in this year’s written round, only those with a score above 80 percent could advance”, explained Péter Szűcs.
The four-part oral round held in Pécs pitted the best nine secondary school students against each other. The first part was a dissecting room exercise, where the task was to recognize formulas marked with pins and flags on real human brains. This was followed by a histology quiz, in which they had to recognize nerve cells and brain areas, and then answer theoretical questions related to them. The third part was about interpreting clinical cases and explaining their background. Finally, the last part of the competition again consisted of questions requiring lexical knowledge, where the competitors described the functions of pathway systems and brain areas, and explained neural processes.
The winner of the domestic final is Áron Pankucsi-Versényi, an eleventh-grade student at UD Kossuth Lajos Secondary School.
“This competition is important for our institute because neuroscience has traditionally been one of our research pillars. In addition, our colleagues have always been actively involved in popularizing science, for example in the Brain Research Week program series. However, our connection to IBB is even closer: we also played a major role in its launch in Hungary. We believe that this is a great opportunity to arouse the interest of talented young people in neuroscience. These students may even work in our laboratories one day”, said Péter Szűcs, Director of the Institute of Anatomy, Histology and Embryology of the Faculty of Medicine of UD.
The domestic winner of the competition has the opportunity of participating in the international final of IBB, which has been held online in recent years and is linked to an international neurobiology conference every year. This year, that will be the Neuroscience 2025 meeting in San Diego in November, hosting more than 30,000 attendees.
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