Graduate Program in Pharmacology

Sakina Eltom, Ph.D. Director of Graduate Studies Division of Cancer Biology

Pharmacology is broadly defined as the study of how chemical agents affect living processes; the chemicals involved include agents such as endogenous hormones, neurotransmitters, and/or growth factors; toxic substances in our environment; and pharmaceutically developed drugs. Thus, by definition, pharmacology is a very broad-based discipline and the Graduate Program in Pharmacology at Meharry Medical College embraces this broad definition. The breadth of our scientific environment is manifested by faculty who study the fate of drugs once ingested and the variability of drug response in varying patient populations (a discipline known as pharmacokinetics), as well as faculty who study the mechanisms by which drugs and endogenous agents work (a discipline known as pharmacodynamics). A unique strength of our research and training environment is the inter-disciplinary nature of the program, which encompasses faculty from the four divisions of the Department of Biomedical Science and Departments of Internal Medicine and Neurology. The discipline of Pharmacology has considerable overlap with many aspects of physiology, biochemistry, immunology, cell biology, molecular biology, neurobiology, psychology, microbiology, chemistry, and medicine. However, Pharmacology is more than just combined components of several disciplines.

Our Goal

The overall goal of this program is to recruit science major and medical students, particularly from populations underrepresented in the biomedical sciences to pursue careers in academic or industrial pharmacology and to equip each student with broad understanding of biomedical research principle, scientific questions, and experimental strategies central to pharmacological research as applied to the cardiovascular disease, neurological disorders, infectious diseases or cancer. Several inter-related goals will be addressed by this program:

• Didactic curriculum will convey to students the vocabulary, theoretical framework, and a practical working knowledge of the tenants of human physiology and pharmacology 
  
• The molecular, cellular and integrated understanding of drug action on the different organ system, pathways of drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics, and drug design and development.
  
• These basic experiences will be supplemented by additional experiences to build competence in research ethics, presentation of scientific data, and assessment of data in the literature.
  
• Conveying to the student the expectation and the tools to pursue life long learning is an important component for future success.

Training Faculty

Samuel E. Adunyah
Twum A. Ansah
Ifeanyi J. Arinze
Clivel C. Charlton
Sanika Chirwa
Salil K. Das
Sankina E. Eltom
Guo-Huang Fan
Zhong Mao Guo
James Hildreth
Darryl B. Hood
Evangeline D. Motley-Johnson
Habibeh Khoshbouei
Sukhbir Mokha
Aramandla Ramesh
Lamonica Stewart
Fernando Villalta