My lab explores the molecular underpinnings of nerve terminal function in both healthy and diseased states. We develop and deploy quantitative optical tools to study single synapse biology.
Synapses are the main points of information transfer between brain cells and controlling the efficacy of this information flow is generally thought to be the basis of learning, memory, and cognition. My lab seeks to understand how nerve terminals, the presynaptic site where neurotransmitter is released, is controlled at the molecular level. A fascinating property of the brain is that it is very vulnerable metabolically. In recent years we have been unravelling the local rules metabolic rules of how ATP is generated at nerve terminals, how this impacts function and how this is impaired in a variety of disease states.
Biography
Tim carried out his undergraduate training at McGill University in Montreal Canada where he majored in Physics. He joined the lab of Watt Webb as a graduate student in Physics at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY where he worked on a variety of problems deploying optical methods to study the biophysical properties of membrane proteins and cell signaling. He switched into cellular neuroscience for his postdoctoral work in the department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University, before launching his independent career in the department of Biochemistry at Weill Cornell Medicine.
Distinctions:
Alfred P. Sloan Fellow (1999)
McKnight Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Award (2000. 2010)
NINDS Javitz Neuroscience Investigator Award (2016)
HHMI Janelia Research Campus Scholar (2018-present)
Elected Member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2024)
Elected Member of the National Academy of Sciences (2024)
Vincent & Brooke Astor Distinguished Professor of Neuroscience
Selected Publications:
Neuromodulatory control of energy reserves in dopaminergic neurons. Pulido C, Gentry MS, Ryan TA. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2025 Dec 16;122(50):e2523019122. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2523019122
Triglycerides are an important fuel reserve for synapse function in the brain. Kumar M, Wu Y, Knapp J, Pontius CL, Park D, Witte RE, McAllister R, Gupta K, Rajagopalan KN, De Camilli P, Ryan TA. Nat Metab. 2025 Jul;7(7):1392-1403. doi: 10.1038/s42255-025-01321-x. Epub 2025 Jul 1. PMID: 40595405
Phosphoglycerate kinase is a central leverage point in Parkinson's disease-driven neuronal metabolic deficits. Kokotos AC, Antoniazzi AM, Unda SR, Ko MS, Park D, Eliezer D, Kaplitt MG, De Camilli P, Ryan TA. Sci Adv. 2024 Aug 23;10(34):eadn6016. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adn6016. Epub 2024 Aug 21.
Periodic ER-plasma membrane junctions support long-range Ca2+ signal integration in dendrites. Benedetti L, Fan R, Weigel AV, Moore AS, Houlihan PR, Kittisopikul M, Park G, Petruncio A, Hubbard PM, Pang S, Xu CS, Hess HF, Saalfeld S, Rangaraju V, Clapham DE, De Camilli P, Ryan TA, Lippincott-Schwartz J. Cell. 2025 Jan 23;188(2):484-500.e22. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2024.11.029. Epub 2024 Dec 20.
