Südhof, Thomas Christian, 1955–, German-American biochemist. M.D., b. Göttingen, Germany, Ph.D. Georgia Augusta Univ., Göttingen, 1982. Südhof joined the faculty at the Univ. of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in 1983. He became an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1991 and professor at Stanford in 2008. Südhof has done extensive research on synapses and transmission of signals across synapses by neurotransmitters, with particular focus on the release of neurotransmitters. He shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Randy Südhof and James Rothman for their discoveries concerning the regulation of vesicle traffic (a major transport system in body cells). Südhof uncovered the mechanism by which vesicles are signaled to release their cargo—for example, hormones and enzymes—with precision.
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