Rate My Professor Tom Baden

Professor Tom Baden is Professor of Neuroscience in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Sussex, having joined as Senior Lecturer in 2016 and been promoted to full Professor in 2018. He currently serves as Director of Sussex Neuroscience. Baden earned his BA and MA with honours in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge in 2004, followed by a PhD in Zoology from the same university in 2008 under Berthold Hedwig. He completed a Habilitation in Experimental Ophthalmology at the University of Tübingen in 2016. His postdoctoral work included a Career Development Fellowship at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge (2008–2010) and a Research Fellowship at the University of Tübingen's Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience (2010–2016) in Thomas Euler's lab. Baden is a German national born in June 1982.

Baden's research investigates how synapses, neurons, and circuits generate sensory function in the retina and evolve across species to adapt to diverse environments. His highly cited work, with over 6,600 citations and an h-index of 36 as of 2026, includes seminal papers such as 'The functional diversity of retinal ganglion cells in the mouse' (Nature, 2016; 1,201 citations), 'Retinal bipolar cells: elementary building blocks of vision' (Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2014; 742 citations), 'Understanding the retinal basis of vision across species' (Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2020; 402 citations), and 'Open Labware: 3-D printing your own lab equipment' (PLoS Biology, 2015; 414 citations). He has authored or co-authored over 50 peer-reviewed publications. Baden has received prestigious awards including election as an EMBO Member (2023), Nature Research Award for Driving Global Impact (2019), Lister Prize for Preventive Medicine (2018), EMBO Young Investigator Fellowship (2018), Leverhulme Trust Prize (2017), and Eppendorf & Nature Young European Investigator Award (2017). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology (2019) and FENS Kavli Network (2017). Baden has secured approximately £9 million in research grants, including a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award (2020), and contributes editorially to PLoS Biology. He founded Open Labware, with over 100,000 downloads, and co-founded TReND in Africa.