Dr. GPCR Podcast

To read the full #Newsletter click here:  https://www.drgpcr.com/september-2021/ ------------------------------------------- Imagine a world in which the vast majority of us are healthy. The #DrGPCR Ecosystem is all about dynamic interactions between us who are working towards exploiting the druggability of #GPCR's. We aspire to provide opportunities to connect, share, form trusting partnersh...

Tom Sakmar is a physician-scientist and Rockefeller University professor dedicated to drug discovery and chemical biology research, mainly involving GPCRs. He and his artist/designer wife, Karina Åberg, have three teenage children. ------------------------------------------- Imagine a world in which the vast majority of us are healthy. The #DrGPCR Ecosystem is all about dynamic interactions betwee...

About Dr. Sudha Shenoy Dr. Sudha Shenoy is currently an Associate Professor in Medicine & Cell Biology in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, Duke University Medical Center. She received her Ph. D. from Oklahoma State University and completed her postdoctoral training with Dr. Robert J. Lefkowitz (Nobel Laureate, 2012) at Duke University. Dr. Shenoy’s postdoctoral research discovered that...

About Dr. Nyla Naim Nyla is a Senior Scientist on the Scientific Support Team at Addgene. She received her Ph. D. at the University of Pittsburgh and continued her postdoctoral research at the University of Vermont studying cellular signaling, biosensors, and optogenetics. Nyla supports biomedical research by connecting researchers with resources and promoting reproducible science. About Dr. Micha...

About Dr. Simone Prömel Simone Prömel is currently a professor of cell biology at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany. Being a biochemist by training, she completed her Ph. D. at the Institute of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford, UK. During this time, she discovered her love for Adhesion GPCRs and started delineating the molecular mechanisms of the Adhesion GPCR Latrophi...

Gunnar Schulte is a Professor in receptor pharmacology and research group leader for the section Receptor Biology and Signaling at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology. He has a background in biochemistry from the Free University in Berlin/Germany and a Ph. D. in molecular pharmacology (supervisor: Bertil B Fredholm; 1998-2002) from Karolinska Institutet. As a postdoc, he trained first wi...

''Ralf Jockers studied in Cologne and received a Ph. D. in biotechnology and biochemistry from the University of Braunschweig, Germany. For postdoctoral training, he joined the laboratory of Dr. AD Strosberg in France, where he worked on the regulation of ß-adrenergic receptors. He is the Research director at INSERM with a specific interest in G protein-coupled receptors by developing original BRE...

Steve Foord trained as a Physiologist and Pharmacologist and worked for Glaxo through to GSK from 1986 to 2008. He introduced molecular pharmacology to a wide range of the companies GPCR projects and was able to initiate some projects. These included the identification of RAMPs (solving some CGRP family issues) and the GABA B, carboxylic and nicotinic acid receptors. He also discovered and champio...

Randy Hall, Ph. D., is a Professor of Pharmacology and Chemical Biology in the Emory University School of Medicine.  Randy received his Bachelor's degree in 1990 from the University of New Hampshire and attended graduate school at the University of California at Irvine, studying the regulation of ionotropic glutamate receptors under the direction of Gary Lynch.  After obtaining his Ph. D...

Stuart graduated from the University of Leeds in the U.K. with a First Class Honors degree in Pharmacology. At the end of his studies, he was awarded the Pfizer Prize for undergraduate research. He then completed his Ph. D. at Leeds as well as the University’s Ackroyd, Brotherton, and Brown Scholar. Following his Ph. D., Dr. Maudsley was awarded a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Fellowship to trai...

After obtaining a BSc in chemistry at the University of Alberta in Edmonton Canada, Terry received his Ph. D. in Pharmacology from the University of Alberta, Department of Chemistry, Canada. Dr. Kenakin then moved to the UK, where he did a post-doctoral fellowship in University College London with Sir James Black. His next stop took him to Burroughs-Wellcome (BW) in Research Triangle Park (RTP) in...

Dr. Bender completed his undergraduate studies at Colgate University in upstate New York with a degree in Biochemistry. Between undergraduate and graduate school Brian worked as a technician in an academic lab before moving to Nashville, TN for graduate work at Vanderbilt University where he joined the Department of Pharmacology. Brain’s work there primarily focused on structure prediction of GPCR...

Dr. Kathryn E Livingston is currently a Product Manager at Gator Bio, a biotechnology company providing solutions to researchers studying protein-protein interactions. Kathryn obtained her BS in Chemistry from Carnegie Mellon University and went on to receive a Ph. D. in Pharmacology at the University of Michigan. Working under the supervision of Dr. John Traynor, Kathryn worked to develop and und...

Alexander is currently a postdoc as a member of the personalized medicine cluster in Copenhagen and at the Institute of Biological Psychiatry in Roskilde working with the UK Biobank and other large-scale population cohorts. Alexander has a big interest in the integration of large biomedical data in genomics, structural biology, pharmacology, and pharmacoepidemiology with innovative computational m...

Sam completed his Ph. D. in biochemistry, studying allosteric modulation of dopamine receptors, from the University of Kent, United Kingdom. He then moved to the National Institute of Mental Health, researching pharmacological mechanisms of Class B GPCRs as part of his postdoctoral training. Today, Sam is a pharmacology data analyst and the founder of Pharmechanics LLC, a consultancy and data anal...

Michel Bouvier is a professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine and the CEO of the Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer (IRIC) at the Université de Montréal. Following his Ph. D. in Neurological Sciences at the same university in 1985, he completed a post-doctoral fellow at Duke University in the laboratory of R.R. Lefkowitz. In 1989, he returned to Montréal as a professor of bioch...

''Brian Arey is Senior Director of Mechanistic Pharmacology within Leads Discovery and Optimization at Bristol-Myers, Squibb Co. in Lawrenceville, NJ. He obtained both his MS and Ph. D. in Neuroendocrine Physiology at Florida State University before completing his postdoctoral training at Northwestern University. He then moved to work in the pharmaceutical industry where he has held positions of i...

Brian Arey is Senior Director of Mechanistic Pharmacology within Leads Discovery and Optimization at Bristol-Myers, Squibb Co. in Lawrenceville, NJ. He obtained both his MS and Ph. D. in Neuroendocrine Physiology at Florida State University before completing his postdoctoral training at Northwestern University. He then moved to work in the pharmaceutical industry where he has held positions of inc...

David Gloriam is a Professor in Computational Receptor Biology at the University of Copenhagen where he leads a research cluster for GPCR function and drug discovery and a Pharmaceutical Data Science unit. His group runs the GPCRdb database where ~4,000 researchers each month retrieve reference data and access online tools for analysis, visualization, and experiment design. Dr. Gloriam is a corres...

Dr. Chris Tate obtained his Ph. D. from the University of Bristol in 1989 and then moved to the University of Cambridge (Dept of Biochemistry) to work on bacterial sugar transporters. In 2005 he started working on the development of conformational thermostabilization of GPCRs, which resulted in the structure of the β1-adrenoceptor. In 2016 mini-G proteins were developed as a tool for the structure...

Dr. Pfleger trained as a pharmacologist and obtained his Ph. D. at the University of Edinburgh. I sat down with Kevin to chat about GPCRs, pharmacology, and his contributions to the field in both the academic and biotech worlds. Professor Pfleger has developed extensive expertise in profiling receptor binding and function at the molecular and cellular levels over the last 20 years, particularly in...

Elva is currently a research fellow at the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences. Elva moved to Canada where she obtained her Ph. D. at the University of Western Ontario, working on the regulation of G proteins signaling by accessory proteins, such as RGS proteins and GPSM proteins. After her Ph. D., she moved to Australia and continues working on GPCRs. Her current research focuses on class...

Eleonora Comeo is a doctoral candidate in Medicinal Chemistry and Drug Discovery in the joint program of the University of Nottingham in the UK and Monash University in Australia. We sat down to chat about GPCRs, synthesizing labeled ligands, and her unique position that allows her to work with GPCR scientists on 2 continents. We also touched on how COVID-19 affected her Ph. D. work.

''Dr. Ross Cheloha is an Investigator at the National Institutes of Health in the Laboratory of Bioorganic Chemistry in Bethesda, MD, where he started in October 2020. He completed his postdoctoral training at MIT and Harvard Med School in the lab of Hidde Ploegh where he developed new applications of single domain antibodies (nanobodies). He earned his PhD in Chemistry at the University of Wiscon...

It was December 14th, 2020, 1:50 pm, when I turned on my laptop and signed into Zoom for my chat with Bob. Bob, who, you might ask? Well, it’s the one and only Robert J. Lefkowitz, M.D., 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which he shared with Dr. Brian Kobilka. Bob doesn’t really need an introduction since his reputation precedes him. Before we pressed record, I asked if I could call him Bob, and he a...