Dr Tommi Anttonen
About
Current role
I am currently working as a postdoctoral research associate at the Animal Vibration Lab, focusing on how fibroblasts generate and detect vibrational cues in the extracellular matrix - a structural support network of fibrous proteins and other molecules that surround cells and act as a structural scaffold for tissues.
Previous positions
I got my PhD from the University of Helsinki, Finland, where I studied the development and cellular stress responses of mechanosensory hair cells and the associated supporting cells of the mouse inner ear.
To learn electrophysiological approaches to study the synaptic encoding of sounds, I worked at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Germany where I contributed to the surprising discovery that hair cells are electrically coupled together and form receptive fields in the inner ear (ref).
Next, I moved to Denmark where I expanded my expertise in auditory physiology and animal behaviour at Aarhus University where I for example contributed to the characterization a novel mouse model of a human deafness syndrome.
Supported by Lundbeckfonden, I studied the development and physiology of hearing in zebra finches at the Sound Communication and Behaviour Group at the University of Southern Denmark.
In 2023, I had the opportunity to spend a summer at Marine Biological Laboratory in USA as a Kavli-Grass fellow where I studied the effects of temporary hearing loss in songbirds and joined an exiting collaboration that described how individual, regenerating jellyfish can physiologically integrate together.