Thomas Christian Südhof was born in Göttingen in 1955, and obtained his M.D. and doctoral degrees from the University of Göttingen in 1982. He performed his doctoral thesis work at the Max-Planck-Institut für biophysikalische Chemie in Göttingen with Prof. Victor P. Whittaker on the biophysical structure of secretory granules, and his internship in the University of Göttingen Hospitals from 1981 to 1982.

From 1983-1986, Südhof trained as a postdoctoral fellow with Drs. Mike Brown and Joe Goldstein at UT Southwestern in Dallas, TX, and elucidated the structure, expression and cholesterol-dependent regulation of the LDL receptor gene. Subsequently, Südhof served on the faculty of UT Southwestern in Dallas until 2008, where Südhof among others served as the founding chair of the Department of Neuroscience.

Südhof moved to Stanford University in 2008 where he currently holds the position of Avram Goldstein Professor in the School of Medicine. In addition, Südhof has been an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1986. Südhof is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the Royal Society of the UK, Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Südhof is the recipient of several awards, including the Alden Spencer Award (1993), the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology (1997), the Bristol-Myers Award in Neuroscience (2004), the Passano Award (2008), the Kavli Award in Neuroscience (2010), the Lasker-deBakey Medical Basic Research Award (2013), and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (2013).

Südhof lives with his wife Dr. Lu Chen, who is also a professor at Stanford University, and their three young children in Menlo Park, CA.

More information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_C._Südhof