Tommi Anttonen

Tommi Anttonen is a biologist who studies how animals detect sounds and vibrations with their sensory systems and how these systems respond to and cope with environmental stressors. His PhD work (University of Helsinki, Finland) focused on the cellular mechanisms of noise- and ototoxin-induced hearing loss in mice. Since then, he has studied how auditory hair cells encode sound signals into neural activity (Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Germany) and how genetic mutations may impair sensory function (Aarhus University, Denmark). More recently, he has investigated songbird acoustic communication and hearing (University of Southern Denmark). As a Kavli-Grass fellow (MBL, USA), he explored how the songbird auditory system recovers from noise exposures and how jellyfish can integrate their neural systems together. He currently works at the Animal Vibration Lab (University of Oxford) where he studies how cells may use vibrations of the extracellular matrix for cell-cell communication.