Ege Kavalali

Major depression is one of the most common mental disorders in the U.S. Approximately 7% (17.3 million) of American adults had at least one major depressive episode in 2017. Roughly 10 percent of the U.S. population is afflicted with major depressive disorder at any… Read More

The 2025 School of Medicine Faculty Awards for Excellence in Teaching, Extraordinary Performance of Clinical Service, and Outstanding Contributions to Research were presented during the May 30 Spring Faculty Meeting. Read More

For the nearly 30 percent of major depressive disorder patients who are resistant to treatment, ketamine provides some amount of normalcy, but it requires frequent treatment and can have side effects. Vanderbilt researchers now show in proof-of-concept experiments that it may be possible to extend ketamine’s antidepressant effect from about a week to up to two months. Read More

Meet Ashley Haddard, the senior program manager for research for the Department of Pharmacology in the Vanderbilt School of Medicine Basic Sciences. Read More

Researchers from the School of Medicine Basic Sciences found that, although synapses are not bound by a membrane, they are still able to maintain a nanostructure necessary for evoked neurotransmission with the help of a physicochemical phenomenon called liquid-liquid phase separation. Read More

Lisa Monteggia, Barlow Family Director of the Vanderbilt Brain Institute and professor of pharmacology, and Ege Kavalali, chair of the Department of Pharmacology and William Stokes Professor of Experimental Therapeutics, have been awarded the first prize by the Anna-Monika Foundation. Read More

The brain is constantly firing and controlling purposeful action potentials—electronic messages used by neurons to communicate with each other and allow the brain to function. Conversely, the way spontaneous neural communication happens in the brain has been found to make use of a different process. Ege Kavalali, William Stokes Chair in Experimental… Read More

Ege T. Kavalali, William Stokes Professor of Experimental Therapeutics, has been named chair of the Department of Pharmacology in Vanderbilt University School of Medicine Basic Sciences. National leaders in pharmacology, members of the pharmacology department at Vanderbilt and Lawrence J. Marnett, dean… Read More

THE IDEA Vanderbilt researchers found that ketamine’s rapid antidepressant action is due to specific synaptic effects. This represents a new target for drug development that could fill a major gap in care for depression. Ege Kavalali (Vanderbilt University) Lisa Monteggia (John Russell/Vanderbilt University) The research was led by… Read More