Tommas Ellender is a cellular neuroscientist and leads the Neuronal Circuit Research group in the Department of Biomedical Sciences. Trained as a biologist at Leiden University he moved to Oxford University for his DPhil and subsequent postdoctoral fellowships after which he started his lab in the Department of Pharmacology at Oxford. In 2021 he moved to Antwerpen as part of the Experimental Neurobiology Unit. His recent work has focussed on understanding the cellular mechanisms that control the development of the basal ganglia and in particular the roles for embryonic progenitor diversity.