Prof. Dr. Timo Mueller

Timo Müller studied Animal Physiology at Philipps-University Marburg, Germany. In 2009, he received his PhD at the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Metabolic Disease Institute, University of Cincinnati, USA, before returning to Germany in 2011, where he has led the group of Molecular Pharmacology at the Institute for Diabetes and Obesity (IDO), Helmholtz Munich. Since 2023, Müller is Director of the Institute for Diabetes and Obesity, and since 2024, full Professor and chair of Energy and Glucose Metabolism at the Walther-Straub Institute for Pharmacology and Toxicology, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (LMU), Germany.

Timo Müllers research is focused on the development and evaluation of novel unimolecular pharmacotherapies to treat the metabolic syndrome, and in particular obesity and diabetes. He is part of an international team of scientists who pioneered the concept of GLP-1-based dual-and triple-agonists for the treatment of obesity and diabetes. He published >200 manuscripts, including articles in Nature, Cell, Cell Metabolism, Nature Medicine, Nature Metabolism, and Nature Communications. A full list of his manuscripts can be found here. 

In Brief, Müller discovered that adipose-specific loss of p62 leads to extreme obesity in mice (Müller et al., J Clin Invest 2013) and identified GPR83 as a regulator of energy metabolism (Müller et al., Nat Commun 2013). He established the concept of glucagon-mediated hepatic delivery of T3 to enhance lipid and cholesterol metabolism (Finan et al. Cell 2016) and showed GLP-1-mediated delivery of estrogen to restore beta-cell mass in diabetic mice (Sachs et al. Nat Metab 2020). He refuted the concept that alternatively activated macrophages regulate adaptive thermogenesis (Fischer et al., Nat Med 2017), identified the signal mechanism of how p62 regulates energy metabolism (Fischer et al., Nat Commun 2020), and identified the CNS GIP receptor as a key regulator of body weight (Zhang et al., Cell Metab 2021). He further discovered that GIPR agonism regulates energy metabolism via GABAergic GIPR neurons (Liskiewicz et al., Nat Metab 2023), that GIPR agonism and antagonism decrease body weight via different mechanisms (Gutgesell et al., Nat Metab 2025), and that targeted delivery of Tesaglitazar enhances glucose metabolism regulation of GLP-1R agonism (Quarta et al., Nat Metab 2022). He also published two of the most cited manuscripts of Molecular Metabolism (Müller et al., Mol Metab 2015 and Müller et al., Mol Metab 2019).