2017 Eppendorf Award for Young European Investigators presented to Tom Baden

In 2017, the Hamburg life science company presented its highly prestigious research prize for the 22nd time. The independent Eppendorf Award Jury chaired by Professor 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 22 June 2017. The laudatory speech honouring Tom Baden’s achievements was delivered by Award Jury member, Professor 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 parallelised representation of the visual world to be sent to the brain.

Tom Baden: “I am humbled and delighted by this award, which recognises 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 honours 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 Professor Reinhard Jahn (Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, Germany), Professor Dieter Häussinger (Clinic for Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Infectiology, Du?sseldorf, Germany), Professor Maria Leptin (EMBO, Heidelberg, Germany), Professor Martin J. Lohse (Max Delbru?ck Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association, Berlin, Germany), and Professor Laura Machesky (Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute, Glasgow, UK).