Tamás Balla received his M.D. degree from the Semmelweis University School of Medicine, Budapest, Hungary in 1979. He was Assistant Professor in the Department of Physiology at Semmelweis, working in the laboratory of Andras Spat, and received his Ph.D. from the Hungarian National Academy of Science in 1987. He was a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Kevin J. Catt, at the ERRB of NICHD from 1985-87 and returned to the NIH in 1989. He is currently Head of the Section of Molecular Signal Transduction.