Prof. Dr. Tõnis Timmusk

Professor Tõnis Timmusk (born in 1959) has worked in several universities outside of Estonia from 1991-2003, including the Karolinska Institutet, the Uppsala University in Sweden and the University of Helsinki, Finland. Since 2002 he is a professor of molecular biology at the Tallinn University of Technology. Prof Timmusk is among the most cited Estonian scientists and has published nearly 70 publications with nearly 6,300 citations according to the ISI Web of Science database. He is a molecular neurobiologist with main research interests in neurotrophic factors, gene regulation and signaling in the nervous system. His studies have contributed to the understanding of the function, signaling and gene regulation of both NGF and GDNF family ligands and their receptors. In collaboration with Prof. Mart Saarma, he has discovered and characterized CDNF, the novel neurotrophic factor for dopamine neurons and has received the prestigious Welcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship. Prof Timmust is a co-inventor in 6 patent applications.