Timothy Blenkinsop

Biography

 Dr Timothy Blenkinsop obtained his BS at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and his MS and PhD at New York University, under the supervision of Dr Eric Lang, in the department of Neuroscience and Biophysics directed by Dr Rodolfo Llinas. Currently, Dr Blenkinsop is an assistant professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Hong Leong Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore. He is a member of the Retinal Stem Cell Consortium, a NY-state supported consortium of investigators that is developing a cell transplantation therapy for patients with age-related macular degeneration, with the aim of rescuing their vision.

Research Interest

 During his PhD program, Dr Blenkinsop conducted in vivo multielectrode recordings of multiple regions of the cerebellar system, which demonstrated the importance of gap junctions in the inferior olive on the rhythmicity and synchrony of the cerebellum for motor coordination. This electrophysiological background benefited him greatly when he joined the laboratory of Dr Sally Temple as a postdoctoral fellow at the Neural Stem Cell Institute in Rensselaer, NY. Dr Blenkinsop developed a new technique to culture retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) from adult human cadaver donors, so that RPE retain their native physiology in vitro. Moreover, this led to discovering a new stem cell in the RPE, termed the RPESC, and revealed the plasticity of the RPE cells. He has since developed in vitro models of RPE diseases, including age-related macular degeneration and proliferative vitreoretinopathy. He is continuing to examine the epigenetic landscape of RPE during normal eye development and in RPE diseases, to pinpoint the transcriptional foundation that endows RPE with plasticity.