Timothy Bliss - Biography#

Tim Bliss was born in England and gained his PhD at McGill University in Canada. In 1967 he joined the MRC National Institute for Medical Research in Mill Hill, London, where he was Head of the Division of Neurophysiology from 1988 till 2006. His work with Terje Lømo in Per Andersen’s laboratory at the University of Oslo in the late 1960’s established the phenomenon of long-term potentiation (LTP) as the dominant synaptic model of how the mammalian brain stores memories. Since then he has worked on many aspects of LTP, including presynaptic mechanisms responsible for the persistent increase in synaptic efficacy that characterizes LTP, and the relationship between synaptic plasticity and memory.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (London), and a Founding Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (UK). He shared the international Bristol Myers Squibb award for Neuroscience with Eric Kandel in 1991, and the Ipsen Prize for Neural Plasticity with Richard Morris and Yadin Dudai in 2013. In 2011 he received an honorary degree from Dalhousie University. In May 2012 he gave the annual Croonian Lecture at the Royal Society on ‘The Mechanics of Memory’.

Tim was a member of national and international scientific Advisory Committees: Centre for Synaptic Plasticity, University of Bristol (Chair), Feldberg Foundation (UK and Germany), Lister Foundation (UK), Fondation Louis Jeantet, Geneva. He supervised numerous PhD students, obtained numerous research grant awards, and has for many years served as a reviewer for all major UK research funding bodies, international funding bodies and top-ranking research journals (Nature, Science, Cell, Neuron, others).