Meet the departments: Pharmacology: A research enterprise on a pillar of excellence 

By Emily Hawes and Lorena Infante Lara

The Vanderbilt University School of Medicine Basic Sciences encompasses four departments: Biochemistry, Cell and Developmental Biology, Molecular Physiology and Biophysics, and Pharmacology. Through this article series, we are featuring each one, highlighting their proudest accomplishments, unique strengths, and visions for the future.

A groundwork for success
Vanderbilt’s pharmacology department is one of the oldest programs in the country, and it has maintained a superlative status by continually adapting to overcome new challenges and provide the best possible training. The department’s first three chairs oversaw it for nearly seven decades, but each chair was critical in pushing the department’s research and innovation momentum forward.

Photo of two graduate students at a lab bench.
Graduate student Morgan Ottley, left, and postdoc Baris Tosun working in the pharmacology lab of Richard Sando (Photo by Jamie McCormick)

The enterprise began with Dr. Canby Robinson—the first dean of the medical school and a key driving force behind its establishment—hiring Dr. Paul Lamson in 1923 to be the first chair of the nascent department. Lamson fostered a culture of innovation in large part through his own actions: He built one of the first artificial hearts and was the first scientist to artificially induce cirrhosis of the liver.

Lamson’s tenure lasted until 1953 when Dr. Allan D. Bass took over. Bass was a prolific scientist whose research career spanned four decades and subjects as varied as anthelmintics (a type of antiparasitic drug), skin sterilizing agents, sulfonamides, adrenal corticosteroids, hormones, and chemical transmitters. He transformed the department from the relatively small entity it was then to a program that attained national recognition for its research excellence. In fact, in recognition of his legacy, the Department of Pharmacology established the Allan D. Bass Lectureship in the late 1970s and the Allan D. Bass Chair in 1995.

Joel G. Hardman, a research giant who first came to Vanderbilt to complete a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Earl Sutherland and was chair of the department from 1975 to 1990, discovered an enzyme called guanylate cyclase. It synthesizes cyclic GMP from GTP, a source for energy in the body similar to its better-known cousin, ATP. Hardman’s finding led to the understanding that cGMP—like cAMP, which Sutherland discovered and which earned him the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 1971—can serve as an intracellular second messenger.

Leading ladies

Since Hardman, there have been five more department chairs—three of them female. According to Ege Kavalali, the current chair, a huge part of the department’s research impact and a key factor distinguishing it from its peers is the strength of its female faculty.

The three chairs—Lee Limbird, Elaine Sanders-Bush, and Heidi Hamm—each left their mark on the department in ways that are still felt today.

Headshosts (left to right) of Lee Limbird, Elaine Sanders-Bush, Heidi Hamm, and Lisa Monteggia.
From left to right: Lee Limbird, Elaine Sanders-Bush, Heidi Hamm, and Lisa Monteggia (All photos Vanderbilt University)

Limbird became the department’s first female chair in 1991, and under her leadership it became one of the top pharmacology departments in the nation in terms of federal funding levels, graduate training, and research publication impact. She is known for her pioneering research on alpha-2 adrenergic receptors and how they relate to the regulation of blood pressure, sedation, pain suppression, and opioid drug action.

Additionally, Limbird is known for her “legendary” devotion to mentoring graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and young faculty, as attested by a 2013 award announcement by the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.

Although Sanders-Bush was only interim chair during the turn of the millennium, she was a Vanderbilt staple from the moment she joined as faculty in 1969 to her retirement in 2010. Her research was instrumental in helping scientists understand the structure, function, and regulation of serotonin—a major neurotransmitter—and two serotonin receptor subtypes. Her work set the stage for the current growing field of potential psychedelic-based neurotherapeutics.

Like Limbird, Sanders-Bush placed a significant emphasis on mentoring trainees, particularly those from minority groups, which led to the department’s 2006 establishment of the Elaine Sanders-Bush Award for Mentoring Graduate and/or Medical Students. Sanders-Bush also established and directed both Vanderbilt’s neuroscience Ph.D. program and the Vanderbilt Brain Institute.

Hamm, pharmacology’s most recent female chair, held the post for almost a decade and a half and remains on the faculty. Her research focus has centered on G protein-coupled receptor signaling and the structure and function of GTP binding proteins, and her efforts have resulted in the discovery of novel targets for G-protein signaling. Thanks to her leadership, the department quintupled the size of its National Institutes of Health budget, catapulting it as the top NIH-funded pharmacology department in the nation during her tenure as chair, which ended in 2014.

The department’s record of influential female faculty in pharmacology continues with Lisa Monteggia. Monteggia is the Barlow Family Director of the VBI, and she studies the molecular and cellular mechanisms that underlie psychiatric disorders and their treatment, including antidepressant action. Her studies on rapid antidepressant action, particularly the fact-acting antidepressant effect of ketamine, have been groundbreaking and have recently earned her membership in the National Academy of Medicine.

A highlight on students

Photo of Ege Kavalali sitting in front of a microscope.
Ege Kavalali (Photo by Jamie McCormick)

Vanderbilt’s biomedical doctoral students enroll through its Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences or its Quantitative and Chemical Biology umbrella programs. After a year of classes and research rotations, students choose a permanent home in one of 11 programs or departments—including pharmacology—where they finish their training.

The Department of Pharmacology wasn’t always the training powerhouse it is today. Prior to 1953, only two students had received a Ph.D. from the department. Thanks to a shift in focus, Bass increased that number to over 60 graduates during his 20-year tenure. Today, the department typically enrolls about 25 students and grants five doctorates each year.

A huge part of the department’s training success comes from its emphasis on listening to and implementing student feedback. For example, the department recently underwent an overhaul of the qualifying exam, an assessment designed to evaluate the knowledge a student gained during their coursework and apply it to their thesis work, based on feedback from students. Additionally, the department updated the course curriculum in 2021, providing students with an opportunity to further tailor their education by offering more elective courses. Students are also welcome to give input into the department’s choice of seminar or retreat speakers, even beyond the annual Joel G. Hardman Student-Invited Pharmacology Forum.

“My time at Vanderbilt set the foundation for everything,” Andrew Tapper, PhD’01, director of the Brudnick Neuropsychiatric Research Institute, said. “What I loved about the pharmacology department was that they ensure that you not only are an expert on your project in the lab, but also that you acquire comprehensive foundational knowledge in general pharmacology and physiology, which is something I use to this day.”

Standout faculty
Current research in the department focuses on five major areas: signal transduction, neuroscience, bioactive lipid metabolism, genetic basis of cardiovascular dysfunction, and drug metabolism. The department maintains close ties with the Warren Center for Neuroscience Drug Discovery, the Vanderbilt Brain Institute, and the Vanderbilt Center for Addiction Research, and its cross-disciplinary research allows for the recruitment of high-caliber faculty from a wide variety of backgrounds.

Currently, the department has 26 tenured or tenure-track faculty. Here we highlight the current and incoming junior faculty, whose early-stage career accomplishments are but a glimmer of what their trajectories promise.

Cody Siciliano, assistant professor in the department and a member of VCAR, joined Vanderbilt in 2019. His lab investigates the neural mechanisms involved in individual decision making and how two people may have different responses when confronted with the same situation. Siciliano received a $100,000 award from the Stanley Cohen Innovation Fund in 2020 and was added to the Forbes 30 under 30 – Science list in 2021.

Richard Sando is an assistant professor and a member of the VBI who joined the faculty in 2020 after a postdoctoral fellowship with Nobel laureate Dr. Thomas Südhof at Stanford University. His research focuses on how synapses in the central nervous system assemble and function. In 2022, Sando was awarded the Sloan Research Fellowship, one of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to early-career researchers.

Prashant Donthamsetti arrived in 2022 from the University of California, Berkeley, where he completed postdoctoral work in the lab of Ehud Isacoff. At Berkeley, he developed novel tools to interrogate the function of G-protein coupled receptors in intact living systems using light, marking his arrival to Vanderbilt with an extremely novel and groundbreaking research portfolio in the nascent field of opto-pharmacology. His recent work on photoswitchable allosteric agonists brings a new dimension to drug discovery as conventional drugs are not typically selective for specific receptors and cannot be controlled with spatiotemporal precision.

The most recent additions to the ranks of pharmacology assistant professors are Benjamin Brown, PhD’22, MD’23, a recent graduate from Vanderbilt’s own Medical Scientist Training Program, and Quynh Anh Nguyen.

Photo of postdoc performing an experiment.
Sando lab postdoc Baris Tosun (Photo by Jamie McCormick)

Brown started his faculty career as a research assistant professor of chemistry but joined pharmacology in 2024. He is a member of VCAR and the Center for Applied Artificial Intelligence in Protein Dynamics and has already made waves and earned funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse for “highly innovative studies [that] represent the future of addiction science.”

Nguyen, another highly accomplished young investigator with a background in synaptic signaling and neurophysiology, developed novel tools to interrogate the function of neuronal circuits that gives rise to network imbalances and epilepsy while a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford. Her research seamlessly bridges fields of cell biology, neurological disorders, neurogenetics, neuropharmacology, and signal transduction.

Finally, Shan Meltzer and Valentina Cigliola joined the department’s ranks as assistant professors this past summer and early fall. Meltzer holds the Leonard and Isabelle Goldenson Fellowship and the William Randolph Hearst Fellowship at Harvard Medical School and is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Hanna H. Gray Fellow at Harvard and HHMI until 2027. Working under Harvard’s David Ginty, Meltzer currently studies the molecular mechanisms of somatosensory circuit assembly.

Cigliola already has a major discovery under her belt: she identified a novel transcriptional pathway in zebrafish that is driven by heparin-binding EGF-like growth factor, which robustly regulates spinal cord regeneration and circuit re-assembly after injury. At Vanderbilt, she will pursue this novel pathway to identify further upstream and downstream mechanisms and to investigate why similar mechanisms are not in play in mammals. The latter question has far-reaching implications not only for spinal cord regeneration in humans but also neuronal circuit rewiring and plasticity in the central nervous system.

Given the fantastic pool of talent that the department attracts, it is no wonder that Kavalali, the current chair, gets excited thinking about the department’s future. “Creativity is the currency of science, and I have enjoyed working with our faculty to foster the creativity and outstanding training environment that have enabled new discoveries,” Kavalali said. “We are responsible for carrying the research torch forward, into new depths and new fields, and I know the department is up to the task.”

 

 

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