Hans Thoenen

Hans Thoenen (5 May 1928 in Zweisimmen, Switzerland – 23 June 2012 in Munich, Germany) was a Swiss neurobiologist best known for his work on neurotrophins.

Biography Thoenen studied medicine at the Universities of Bern and Innsbruck, graduating in 1953 and receiving his doctorate from Bern in 1957. In 1961 he joined the research laboratories of the Swiss pharmaceutical company Hoffmann LaRoche, leaving in 1968 to spend a year working with the Axelrod group at NIMH. In 1971 he joined the newly-formed Biocentre at the University of Basel as research group leader in Neurobiology. In 1977 he relocated to Munich where the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry had offered him the directorship of a new institute – what is now the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology – which he led until his retirement in 1996. the Cloëtta Prize (1985), the Charles A. Dana Award for Pioneering Achievement in Health (1994) and the Neuronal Plasticity Prize (1994). He received the Ralph W. Gerard Prize in Neuroscience of the Society for Neuroscience (1995), the ECNP Neuropsychopharmacology Award (1996), and the Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for Distinguished Achievement in Neuroscience Research (1997) jointly with Eric M. Shooter. He was awarded the Ernst Jung Gold Medal in 2007. He was a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences. He received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Würzburg and Zurich.