After getting settled at the Anschutz Medical Campus in Research Complex I, North and South towers, on the 6th floor, the Department of Pharmacology, along with the Neuroscience Program and the Department of Psychiatry, held an Inaugural Open House for the new building in October 2004. Invited speakers were faculty members from the Department of Pharmacology, the Neuroscience Program and the Department of Psychiatry, as well as visiting scientists including Steven Paul, M.D., Executive Vice President, Science and Technology, and President, Lilly Research Laboratories; Tony Pawson, Ph.D., Director of Research, Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, Canada; Jeffrey Rothstein, M.D., Ph.D., Professor, Department of Neurology and Neuroscience Program, Director of Robert Packard Center for ALS Research, Vice Chairman for Research Neurology, Johns Hopkins University; and Philip Chen, Jr., Ph.D., Executive Vice President of Research and Development, Senior Advisor to the Deputy Director for Intramural Research, National Institutes of Health (NIH). Representatives from the National Institutes of Health who joined in the NIH Roadmap discussion were Antonia Noronha, Ph.D., Director, Division of Neuroscience and Behavior, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA); Stephen L. Foote, Ph.D., Director, Division of Neuroscience and Basic and Behavioral Science, National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH); and Christine Colvis, Ph.D., Program Director, Genetics and Molecular Neurobiology Research Branch, National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).
Currently, the Department of Pharmacology primary faculty members are awarded over $16 million in research and training awards. These funds include two Institutional National Research Service Awards for a pre-doctoral and post-doctoral stipends, four federal fellowships as well as three non-federal fellowships.
The Department of Pharmacology also welcomed the The Rocky Mountain 900 MHz Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectrometer, which was established through a grant from NIH, Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) to serve the high field NMR requirements of publicly funded research institutions in Rocky Mountain/West Central states. The initial consortium consisted of seventeen research groups from nine institutions in six states. The specific instrumentation consists in an Oxford Instruments’ 21.1 Tesla-pumped superconducting magnet which was purchased through Varian NMR instruments and installed in May 2005. The installation can be viewed at the site. The addition of our new spectrometer means that only a half dozen institutions nationally and perhaps twenty institutions worldwide can match our structural biology facilities. In addition, a new 96-node “Beowulf” Cluster of Apple Dual 2GHz power PC G5 servers was purchased for informatics and structural research analysis.
The Department has been very successful with its graduate program, boasting the largest student enrollment of any graduate program on campus. There are currently 29 pre-doctoral students seeking a pharmacology Ph.D., and 23 pre-doctoral students training under a Pharmacology mentor, though seeking a degree in another program. The latter students come from the Ph.D. programs in Bioinformatics, Neuroscience, Biomolecular Structure, Human Medical Genetics, Molecular Biology, Biochemistry, and the Computer Science Program at Brown University.
The Graduate Program in Pharmacology and Systems Biology has had a very successful recruitment for this fall (2005), both through direct application and through enrollment of students from interdisciplinary programs. The Program admitted eight new pharmacology Ph.D. students and four new students from other programs training under a Pharmacology mentor. The Bioinformatics program graduated their first Ph.D. student this past year.
Departmental teaching continues to rank very highly among the students from the Medical and Dental Pharmacology courses. The Medical Pharmacology course received a student rating of 4.6 (on a scale of 5 to 1 with 5 representing “excellent”) in the 2004-2005 academic year. This course was ranked second in 2004-2005 among basic sciences courses in the first- and second-year curriculum. Dental Pharmacology received a score of 4.7 with the average of the other basic sciences courses being a 3.9.
Faculty in the Department of Pharmacology continue to excel in their research, teaching and service; and at this time, the Department has over 200 members including, 32 primary faculty at Instructor or above, 26 secondary and/or training faculty, 31 Pharmacology predoctoral candidates, 23 predoctoral students from other programs doing their thesis training in Pharmacology laboratories, 33 postdoctoral candidates, 55 research associates and 7 support staff personnel.
Faculty Awards, Acknowledgements, Honors, Editorships and Other Achievements