Tim Bartness (1953-2015).

TIM BARTNESS died on September 24, 2015 at his home in Atlanta after a year-long battle with multiple myeloma. He was 62 years old. Tim was a superbly innovative and imaginative scientist. Over the course of his distinguished career he applied a broad understanding of metabolic physiology, behavior analysis, and systems neuroscience to two main research areas: the integrated sensorimotor control of adipose tissue function; and the neural bases of food hoarding behavior. Tim obtained his PhD in Psychology and Neuroscience working with Robert Waldbillig at the University of Florida in 1981. Waldbillig had trained with Neal E. Miller, a true pioneer and leader in research on the neural basis of motivated behavior. Tim and Robert published 10 papers together on a range of topics that included effects of estradiol treatment on dietary self-selection, insulin on drinking, and serotonin depletion on food intake, locomotion, body weight, and adiposity. Tim went on to two postdocs, first at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), followed by the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis). He then moved in 1984 to a more senior position at the Worcester Foundation For Experimental Biology in Shrewsbury in Massachusetts. In 1988 Tim moved from the Worcester Foundation to a junior faculty position in the Department of Psychology and later in Biology at Georgia State University (GSU) in Atlanta, which was to be his academic home for the remainder of his career (Fig. 1). The breadth of science and scholarship he acquired in his postdoc years enabled Tim to develop the insight that it would not be possible to understand the full repertoire of feeding and metabolic control mechanisms by relying solely on rats and mice as experimental models. At the University of Massachusetts, his first postdoctoral mentor George Wade (who had trained with Irv Zucker at University of California, Berkeley; Tim and Irv were to become friends), had worked for some time with hamsters to investigate the neural control of metabolism. At first glance, a focus on the hamster might seem a strange choice given the preponderance of mice in current mammalian physiology and neuroscience. But working with Wade showed Tim that hamsters possess two very useful properties for understanding how the brain controls energy metabolism: the amount of adipose tissue carried by some hamster species is heavily influenced by the prevailing photoperiod and therefore must be under strong neural control; and unlike rats and mice but somewhat similar to humans, all hamster species respond to food deprivation and then replenishment by hoarding food rather than by compensatory eating. Together with George Wade, Tim then published a series of papers exploring these processes in some detail. These experiences led Tim to make use of the Syrian hamster (Mesocricetus auratus) and notably to select the Siberian hamster (Phodopus sungorus) as a primary animal model for a considerable part of his research output. This decision allowed him to focus on important metabolic control mechanisms, particularly those residing in the brain, in a way that was not possible in rats and mice. His choice was a beautiful illustration of the fact that nature can provide you with the best models for studying physiological mechanisms, so long as you are intellectually prepared to choose them wisely. In the current environment where the strong desire for understanding genes and molecular mechanisms governing behavior drives so many experimental designs toward mouse models, Tim’s death is a significant loss. It means that the field has lost an effective advocate for alternate physiology-driven animal models. Tim published a set of papers in the latter half of the 1980s with Allen Levine, Charles Billington, John Morley, and others at the University of Minnesota that addressed the role of various neuropeptides in energy homeostasis. This was followed by work with Bruce Goldman, Eric Bittman, and others at the Worcester Foundation that explored the influence of the photoperiod and the circadian clock on the way that Siberian hamsters control their body weight and adiposity as the day length changed. These extensive postdoc experiences gave Tim a solid and astutely structured foundation for establishing his own research program at GSU in 1988. The first few years of Tim’s research at GSU were dedicated to expanding his previous work on photoperiodic influences on energy metabolism and particularly exploring the role of neuroendocrine factors and hormones. However, it quickly became apparent that a full understanding of how the brain controls adipose tissue physiology would only emerge from a more thorough neuroanatomical investigation of the sensory and Address for reprint requests and other correspondence: H. J. Grill, Dept. of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104 (e-mail: [email protected]). Fig. 1. Photograph courtesy and printed with permission from Carolyn Richardson at Georgia State University. Am J Physiol Regul Integr Comp Physiol 310: R385–R387, 2016; doi:10.1152/ajpregu.00036.2016. Editorial