Since 2012, Balázs Gulyás has been a university professor of translational neuroscience at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine (LKCMedicine) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore, and the director of the NTU Cognitive Neuroimaging Centre (CoNiC). Before working as one of the founding professors of LKCMedicine and the first leader of the neurology and mental health program initiated at the medical school, he spent a significant part of his scientific career at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, where he is currently a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Institute of Clinical Neuroscience.

He completed his medical studies at Semmelweis University in his hometown, Budapest, earning his medical degree in 1981 while simultaneously studying physics as a guest student at Eötvös Loránd University. He obtained BA and MA degrees in philosophy from the Catholic University of Leuven (1982, 1984), and later earned a PhD in neurobiology from the same university in 1988.

Following this, he conducted postdoctoral studies at the Department of Clinical Neurophysiology at the Karolinska Institute and the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. Throughout his career, he has participated in several leadership and executive training programs at the University of London, the University of Oxford, and Harvard Business School. Additionally, he obtained a BD degree in theology from Heythrop College, University of London (2020), a CHEMS degree in mathematics from The Open University, Milton Keynes (2022), and habilitated in medicine at the Catholic University of Leuven (1988), the Karolinska Institute (1997), and the University of Debrecen (1999).

Early in his career, he made pioneering observations that contributed to the advancement of research in vision neurology and the functional mapping of the human brain using positron emission tomography (PET). Later, his interest shifted towards PET-based molecular neuroimaging, particularly focusing on neurological and psychiatric disorders and their "humanized" animal disease models. This work included identifying biomarker targets and conducting studies aimed at developing drug-based and diagnostic imaging procedures. Recently, his research has spanned neurology, psychiatry, basic and cognitive neurosciences, and neuroimaging, with a special focus on the neurobiological foundations of the extraordinary capabilities of the human brain.

Balázs Gulyás has published fourteen books as an author or editor, around forty book chapters, and over 290 papers in scientific journals (source: Scopus and ORCID), and has contributed to the creation of seven patents. He is a member of the Academia Europaea (where he serves as chair of the Physiology and Neuroscience section), the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and the Belgian Royal Academy of Medicine. Until his appointment as president of HUN-REN on May 1, 2023, he was a member of the "Advanced Grants Panel" of the European Research Council. He is also an honorary professor in the Department of Brain Sciences at the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College London.