Tom Baden PD., Ph.D.
Heidelberg/Hamburg, June 23, 2017
In 2017, the Hamburg life science company is presenting its highly prestigious research prize for the 22nd time. The independent Eppendorf Award Jury chaired by Prof. Reinhard Jahn selected Dr. Tom Baden, Senior Lecturer in Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom, as the 2017 winner of the Eppendorf Award for Young European Investigators.
The Award ceremony took place at the EMBL Advanced Training Centre in Heidelberg, Germany, on June 22, 2017. The laudatio honoring Tom Baden’s achievements was held by Award Jury member Prof. Maria Leptin.
Tom Baden, born 1982, receives the € 20,000 prize for his ground-breaking work on signal processing in the retina. The Jury: “His results have profoundly changed our understanding of circuits and synaptic computation in the retina, revealing novel and exciting properties of sensory neurons. The findings are of general significance for our understanding how small neuronal microcircuits can dissociate complex sensory patterns into specific representations within the nervous system.”
In his scientific talk ‘What the eye tells the brain, and how it got there’, Tom Baden explained the optical approach that he and his colleagues had tried in order to provide a functional roadmap of how light entering the eye and impinging on millions of photoreceptor neurons ultimately results in a highly processed and parallelized representation of the visual world to be sent to the brain.
Tom Baden: “I am humbled and delighted by this award, which recognizes a long-standing team effort that involved the hard work of several talented colleagues, most notably Katrin Franke, Philipp Berens and Thomas Euler”.
With the Eppendorf Young Investigator Award, which was established in 1995, Eppendorf AG honors outstanding work in biomedical research and supports young scientists in Europe up to the age of 35. The Eppendorf Award is presented in partnership with the scientific journal Nature. The Award winner is selected by an independent committee composed of Prof. Reinhard Jahn (Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, Germany), Prof. Dieter Häussinger (Clinic for Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Infectiology, Düsseldorf, Germany), Prof. Maria Leptin (EMBO, Heidelberg, Germany), Prof. Martin J. Lohse (Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association, Berlin, Germany), and Prof. Laura Machesky (Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute, Glasgow, UK).
More information about entry details, judging procedures, and past winners can be found at
www.eppendorf.com/award
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