Timothy Bliss

Timothy Vivian Pelham Bliss FRS (born 27 July 1940) is a British neuroscientist. 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.

Born in England he was educated at Dean Close School and McGill University (BSc, 1963; PhD, 1967). 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.

In 1973, he and Terje Lømo published the first evidence of a Hebb-like synaptic plasticity event induced by brief tetanic stimulation, known as long-term potentiation (LTP). 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).

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. He is visiting professor at University College London.

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

• 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