Timothy Bliss

Tim Bliss
Born	Timothy Vivian Pelham Bliss 27 July 1940[1]
Institutions	National Institute for Medical Research University College London
Education	Dean Close School
Alma mater	McGill University
Notable awards	FRS (1994)[2] Croonian Lecture (2012)

Timothy Vivian Pelham Bliss FRS (born 27 July 1940) is a British neuroscientist.^[1] He is a visiting professor at University College London, and at the Frontier Institutes of Science and Technology, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, China.

Professor Tim Bliss was with Professors Graham Collingridge and Richard Morris as the first UK scientists to share the Brain Prize (2016), one of the world's most coveted science prizes.^[3]

Life

Born in England he was educated at Dean Close School and McGill University (BSc, 1963; PhD, 1967).^[1] 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 1960s established the phenomenon of long-term potentiation (LTP) as the dominant synaptic model of how the mammalian brain stores memories.

Career and research

In 1973, he and Terje Lømo published^[4] the first evidence of a Hebb-like synaptic plasticity event induced by brief tetanic stimulation, known as long-term potentiation (LTP).^[5][6][7][8] His work has done much to provide a neural explanation for learning and memory. Studying the hippocampus — the memory centre of the brain — Tim showed that the strength of signals between neurons in the brain exhibits a long-term increase following brief but intense activation, a phenomenon known as long-term potentiation (LTP).^[2]

Whilst LTP was discovered in Oslo in the lab of Per Andersen, Tim’s subsequent research into the cellular properties of LTP and its relation to memory was conducted at London’s National Institute for Medical Research where he worked from 1968 to 2006, becoming head of Neurosciences.^[9] He is visiting professor at University College London.

Bliss is on the board of the Feldberg Foundation^[10] and was trustee of Sir John Soane's Museum from 2004 to 2009.^[11]

Awards and Honours^[3]

• 1991 Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for Neuroscience (with E. Kandel)
• 1994 Feldberg Prize
• 1994 Fellow of the Royal Society
• 1998 Founding Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences
• 2003 Annual Award for Contributions to British Neuroscience, British Neuroscience Society
• 2012 Croonian Prize Lecture, Royal Society (this is the Society’s principal lecture in the biological sciences, given annually since 1738)
• 2013 Ipsen Prize for Neuronal Plasticity; Hon LlD Dalhousie University
• 2014 Hon DSc University of Hertfordshire
• 2016 The Brain Prize, European Brain Research Fountation

References

1. BLISS, Dr Timothy Vivian Pelham. Who's Who. 2016 (online Oxford University Press ed.). A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc. (subscription required)
2. "Dr Timothy Bliss FMedSci FRS". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 2015-11-17. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:

   “All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.” --Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies at the Wayback Machine (archived September 25, 2015)

3. "Biography Timothy Bliss - Grete Lundbeck European Brain Research Foundation". www.thebrainprize.org. Retrieved 2016-03-02.
4. Bliss, T. V.; Lomo, T (1973). "Long-lasting potentiation of synaptic transmission in the dentate area of the anaesthetized rabbit following stimulation of the perforant path". The Journal of Physiology. 232 (2): 331–56. doi:10.1113/jphysiol.1973.sp010273. PMC 1350458. PMID 4727084.
5. Dolphin, A. C.; Errington, M. L.; Bliss, T. V. P. (1982). "Long-term potentiation of the perforant path in vivo is associated with increased glutamate release". Nature. 297 (5866): 496–497. doi:10.1038/297496a0. ISSN 0028-0836.
6. Tim V. P. Bliss, Graham L. Collingridge, Richard G. Morris, Long-term potentiation: enhancing neuroscience for 30 years, Oxford University Press, 2004, ISBN 978-0-19-853030-5
7. Per Andersen, Richard Morris, David Amaral, Tim Bliss and John O'Keefe (eds), The hippocampus book. Oxford University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-19-510027-3
8. Bliss, T. V. P.; Collingridge, G. L. (1993). "A synaptic model of memory: Long-term potentiation in the hippocampus". Nature. 361 (6407): 31–39. doi:10.1038/361031a0. PMID 8421494.
9. The Committee Office, House of Commons. "House of Commons - Science and Technology Committee - Written Evidence". Publications.parliament.uk. Retrieved 2012-12-21.
10. "Board members of the Feldberg Foundation". Feldbergfoundation.org. Retrieved 2012-12-21.