Since November 2023, Timo Müller has also been Director of the Institute for Diabetes and Obesity at DZD partner Helmholtz Munich, which he has headed on an interim basis since his predecessor Prof. Matthias Tschöp took over as Scientific Director of Helmholtz Munich.

Müller specializes in endocrinology, diabetes, obesity, energy metabolism, gut hormones, GLP-1, GIP and glucagon. 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 also published two of the most cited manuscripts of Molecular Metabolism (Müller et al., Mol Metab 2015 and Müller et al., Mol Metab 2019).

Further publications
He published more than 160 manuscripts, including articles in Cell, Cell Metabolism, Nature Medicine, Nature Metabolism, and Nature Communications. As postdoctoral fellow, he discovered that 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 oestrogen to restore beta-cell mass in diabetic mice (Sachs et al. Nat Metab 2020).

Professional career
Timo Müller studied Animal Physiology at the 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 then moved on to work as a postdoctoral fellow at the Metabolic Disease Institute, University of Cincinnati, USA. In 2011, Timo Müller returned to Germany, where he ever since leads the Division of Molecular Pharmacology at the Institute for Diabetes and Obesity (IDO), Helmholtz Munich. In November 2023, Timo Müller was appointed Director of the Institute for Diabetes and Obesity. Since February 2024, Timo Müller holds a full professorship (W3) at the Walther-Straub Institute for Pharmacology and Toxicology, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (LMU), Germany.

Awards and prizes
In 2023, Müller received the Minkowski Prize from the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) and the Werner Creutzfeldt Prize from the German Diabetes Association (DDG). He previously won the Galenus von Pergamon Prize from Springer Medizin Verlag in 2022 and was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant Trusted.