药理哲学博士-分子神经药理学

药理学是一门涵盖了药物作用机理研究的健康科学，从在亚细胞水平的分子间和分子内反应到对整个生物体的生理系统的药物作用。毒理学通过了解由于暴露于药物，合成化学药品或天然产品而导致的正常结构或功能的变化，从而关系到人类，动物和环境的安全与健康。作为转化科学，药理学和毒理学采用了许多解剖学，生理学，生物化学，微生物学，免疫学，行为学和生物物理学的原理和方法。这些领域的研究进展使研究生课程能够在药理学和毒理学的各个子学科中提供训练有素的合格科学家。
The doctoral program in Pharmacology now includes a University-approved Concentration in Molecular Neuropharmacology. The focus of this Concentration is to provide training in the molecular aspects of neuropharmacology, with an emphasis in molecular signaling and functional genomics. The Department is now actively recruiting competitive, highly motivated graduate students for training in this unique and topical discipline. The sequencing of the human genome, and of animal species used to model human disease and therapeutics, has revealed some critical gaps in the training of most biomedical scientists. While many newly minted scientists are comfortable with at least some aspects of gene manipulation, few are as adept at analyzing the resulting changes in the organism and its response to the environment (i.e. phenotype). Pharmacologists, by the very nature of their discipline, determine the response of individual cells, tissues and/or organisms to changes in the internal and external environment (including therapeutic agents) and are thus in increasing demand in the 'post-genomic' era. Neuropharmacologists are especially in demand, given both the market value of current therapeutic drugs for CNS disorders and the rapid pace of discovery about basic neural mechanisms that has yet to be tapped for therapeutic purposes. At the same time, biomedical scientists are now acutely aware that there is, in fact, not a single human genome but myriad genomes comprised of countless DNA deletions, insertions, and single nucleotide polymorphisms which change the substrate upon which environmental factors act and also modify our response to therapeutic drugs. Neuropharmacology, in the post-genome era we have entered, thus encompasses both the effects of drugs on neural cell function as well as the influence of genetic variations (from snps to gene knockouts) on drug responses at the cellular and organismic level. In this context, application of molecular and genetic tools will provide critical insights into brain function and facilitate the development of novel therapeutics for brain dysfunction and tumors.