Timothy A. Ryan

Biosketch

Timothy Ryan, PhD is a Rockefeller/Sloan-Kettering/Cornell Tri-Institutional Professor in the department of Biochemistry at Weill Cornell Medical School. He earned is BSc and MSc in Physics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada and his PhD in Physics at Cornell University. Following postdoctoral work in the department of Molecular & Cellular Physiology at Stanford he joined the faculty at Weill Cornell Medical School in the department of Biochemistry in 1997. He was an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, a two-time recipient of the McKnight Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Award and a recipient of the NINDS Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award. In 2017 he became a senior fellow (now termed Scholar) at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia research campus. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

Research Interests

Dr. Ryan’s research focuses on understanding how chemical synapses in the brain function at the molecular level. His lab developed quantitative optical techniques providing analytical measures of parameters associated with synaptic transmission. They discovered that nerve terminals are highly sensitive to metabolic perturbations, a likely locus the human brain’s hypersensitivity to interruption in fuel supply. His lab showed that synapses regulate ATP production such that during activity ATP synthesis matches the bioenergetic needs of the processes associated with synaptic vesicle fusion, recycling, and neurotransmitter loading. They recently discovered that several susceptibility genes associated with neurodegenerative disease, particularly Parkinson’s disease, are closely linked to a synapse’s ability to maintain the bioenergetic balance and that failure to do so because of disease-driving mutations, leads to bioenergetic deficits and synapse dysfunction.