Dr. GPCR Podcast

Dr. Debbie Hay is presently a professor at the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Otago after spending 18 years at the University of Auckland. Her work is primarily focused on class B GPCRs and their interactions with RAMPs. Debbie obtained a Ph. D. in Molecular Pharmacology from Imperial College London in the UK. She has gained experience from working in academia and a...

Originally, Annette wanted to be a medical doctor but as luck has it, she didn’t get into medical school when she first applied. Instead, she discovered research and started her Ph. D. the day she should have started medical school. Dr. Gilchrist completed her Ph. D. in Biomedical Sciences /  Immunology at the University of Connecticut and went on to become a postdoctoral fellow at UIC (Unive...

Dr. Niv is currently an associate professor and vice dean for research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The Niv lab is also part of the Global Consortium for Chemosensory Research. Masha earned her Bachelor’s degree in chemistry, followed by a direct Ph. D. at the Institute of Chemistry, at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. Dr. Niv trained as a postdoctoral fellow at Weill Cornel...

Dr. Fan is currently an associate professor of Pharmacology and Pathology and Cell Biology at Columbia University in NYC. Qing is a structural biologist interested in the molecular mechanisms controlling how class C GPCRs transmit signals. She obtained her bachelor's, master and doctoral degrees at Harvard University and completed her postdoctoral training with Dr. Hendrickson at Columbia Universi...

Dr. Kari Johnson is currently an assistant professor at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. She is a neuropharmacologist with an interest in the long-term effects of alcohol abuse on neural circuits. Kari completed her Ph. D. in Pharmacology at Vanderbilt University before continuing her training as a postdoctoral fellow at the Vanderbilt Center for Neur...

Dr. Maria Waldhoer is originally from Austria. She earned her M.Sc. in Zoology and Neurobiology before completing a Ph. D. in Biology and Pharmacology at the University of Vienna. GPCRs led Maria to Thue W. Schwartz’s lab in Copenhagen where she completed her postdoctoral training. After working in the US and at the University in Graz in Austria, Maria worked several years at Novo Nordisk before j...

Dr. Pluznick discovered that olfactory receptors in mice are also expressed in their kidneys and blood vessels. Her research is focused on the role of chemosensory GPCRs in regulating renal and cardiovascular function, and identifying renal/cardiovascular olfactory receptor ligands, and relating them to whole-animal physiology. This work contributes to a better understanding of how the kidney help...

Fiona Marshall got fascinated with GPCRs after attending a lecture on how the beta-adrenergic receptor in the heart is activated by adrenaline, during her undergraduate studies at Bath University. She then pursued her Ph. D. in neuroscience from Cambridge University. An expert in GPCR biology, Fiona published the first description of the cloning and structural requirements of the GABAB receptor. O...

Listen to this fantastic round table discussion that I had the privilege to moderate with Alexander Hauser . Our guests were Maria Waldhoer , Tudor I. Oprea , Thomas Sakmar , Aurelien Rizk & Yaroslav Nikolaev . The explosion of biomedical data such as in genomics, structural biology, and pharmacology can provide new opportunities to improve our understanding of human physiology and disease. In...

GPCRs have played a central role in my scientific career ever since I took Dr. Michel Bouvier’s class as an undergraduate student at the University of Montreal in early 2000. During the past 2 decades, my research mainly focused on chemokine receptor structure/function relationships. For the purposes of this presentation, I will walk you through my various career experiences and include the skills...

In this episode of the Dr. GPCR Podcast, I spoke to Dr. Aaron Sato from Twist Biopharma, a vertical within Twist Bioscience. Aaron is currently the Chief Scientific Officer and VP of Protein Engineering. He earned his Ph. D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studied MHC class II structure-function relationships. His path led him to work in an industry where he assumed various r...

In this episode of the Dr. GPCR podcast, my guest is Dr. Arun Shukla from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India. Arun is currently an Associate Professor & Joy Gill Chair Professor, Intermediate Fellow, Wellcome Trust DBT India Alliance Swarnajayanti Fellow & EMBO Young Investigator at the Department of Biological Sciences and Bioengineering. He earned his master's degree in...

Dr. Bryan Roth is the Michael Hooker Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill School of Medicine. After receiving his MD and Ph. D. in Biochemistry from St. Louis University in 1983, he subsequently trained in pharmacology (NIH), molecular biology, and psychiatry at Stanford. Bryan leads a $26.9 Million project to create better psychiatric medications...

In this episode of the Dr. GPCR podcast, we meet with Dr. Amynah Pradhan. She is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Amynah did her undergrad research measuring IP3 in airway smooth muscle cells and completed a Ph. D. at McGill University in Canada with Dr. Paul Clarck where she studied opioid receptors. Her next career step took her to AstraZeneca as a p...

In this episode of the Dr. GPCR podcast, we meet with Dr. Antonella Di Pizio, an independent research group leader at the Leibniz-Institute for Food Systems Biology at the Technical University of Munich. Antonella trained as a medicinal chemist in Italy, which she followed up by a Ph. D. in computational medicinal chemistry, during which she developed a taste for structural biology. Antonella then...

In this special episode of the Dr. GPCR podcast, I sat down with the co-founders of Genemod. Jacob Lee and Jin Choe met in ninth grade in English class and have been friends since. Although both went to the same college, Jacob and Jin choose different career paths. One day as they were catching up, Jacob shared his struggles of managing samples and an incredible amount of data and projects in the...

Our guest in this episode of the Dr. GPCR podcast is Dr. John Streicher from the department of pharmacology at the University of Arizona. John started grad school in 1999 and spent some time figuring out what he was interested in. It turns out that it was signal transduction and he worked on the signaling cascades involved in heart failure. His encounter and interest in signaling in the context of...

In this special Dr. GPCR podcast episode, we sat down to chat with Lauren Celano to talk about career options for Ph. D.’s. Working in a lab allows scientists to gain amazing hard and soft skills, which opens the doors to a number of great careers, that many have not even considered, yet.  Lauren has a science background and is passionate about helping talented scientists find their dream pos...

Dr. Graciela Pineyro is a professor of pharmacology at the department of pharmacology and physiology of the University of Montreal. She has done extensive work on the molecular pharmacology of opioid receptors and is currently focusing on the pharmacology of cannabinoids in the context of pain. We chatted about how the current pandemic has affected her personally and professionally.

Dr. Paul Insel is currently a Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology and the University of California San Diego. Paul thinks broadly about science and has been actively publishing papers about his ideas on how COVID symptoms could be treated while we wait for a vaccine, particularly about ACE2 and angiotensin. For the past 30 years, he has been the Director of MD/Ph. D. training program at UCSD a...

Dr. J. Silvio Gutkind sheds light on his work and life since the beginning of COVID restrictions. Dr. J. Silvio Gutkind is a Professor of Pharmacology based at UCSD School of Medicine. A large component of his work is centered around dysregulated signaling in cancer and the development of novel mechanism-based cancer therapies. In this episode, Dr. J. Silvio Gutkind highlights how his past experie...

Dr. Terry Hébert is a Professor within the Department of Pharmacology & Therapeutics at McGill University. Much of his work is based around GPCR signaling in context to cardiovascular diseases. In this special episode of the Dr. GPCR podcast, we re-connected with Dr. Terry Hebert to chat about how he and his team has been adapting to the new reality of working remotely.  Terry tells us ab...

Dr. Graciela Pineyro’s love for GPCR pharmacology started in Uruguay where she first worked on the serotonin receptors. This interest in research and pharmacology took Graciela to Canada where she stayed ever since she arrived for her Ph. D. work. Graciela has done extensive work on the molecular pharmacology of opioid receptors, exploring their signaling, trafficking, and their ability to activat...

Have you had moments that defined your scientific tastes? For Dr. J Silvio Gutkind, a class on oncogenes and his interests for GPCRs helped shape his scientific interests. These took him from the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina to UC San Diego and through the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. In this episode, Silvio discusses G protein signaling in the context of cancer,...

Dr. Terry Hebert wanted to be a microbiologist. Instead, he ended up getting interested in membrane protein as he followed the biology of a bacterial toxin that affects a mammalian ion channel. Today he and his team are working on understanding receptor signaling in specialized cellular environments to gain a better grasp of receptor function in pathophysiological settings with a special interest...