Prof Werner Sieghart, emeritus professor at the Medical University of Vienna, an internationally recognised pioneer on the structure, distribution and function of GABA-A receptors, and a long-term collaborator on several Unit programmes has been elected an Honorary Fellow of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences on the 6th of May 2013. Amongst other discoveries Prof Sieghart demonstrated the multiplicity of of GABA-A receptors using radioligand binding of allosteric modulator benzodiazepines (Sieghart and Karobath, 1980). He went on to show that distinct GABA-A receptors are differentially located in the central nervous system (Zimprich et al., 1991). More recently, he and his colleagues identified the diazepam-bound atomic structure of the GABA-A receptor using homology modelling and an unbiased docking protocol (Richter et al., 2012).