Congratulations to Dr. Moehle and his lab for recently having their manuscript titled "Early a-synuclein aggregation decreases corticostriatal glutamate drive and synapse density" accepted in the journal of Neurobiology of Disease.

Congratulations to Sarah Sniffen, from the Wesson Lab, for receiving the Don Tucker Memorial Award for outstanding graduate student presentation at the annual Association for Chemoreception Sciences meeting, in Bonita Springs, Florida. AChemS is the largest organization dedicated to research in the chemical senses and this award is given to one graduate student every year for the most meritorious research presentation.

She is pictured on the right, shaking hands with the current president of AChemS, Dr. Alfredo Fontanini. 

Congratulations Austin Kratz, a Ph.D. candidate in the Russ Lab, for being awarded a training spot on the Diabetes/Bioengineering T32. 

Congratulations to Sultan Khanfar, from the Oliveira Lab, for winning The Barry Goldwater Scholarship, the nation's most prestigious undergraduate award in the natural sciences, mathematics, and engineering! Scholars are recognized for demonstrating outstanding potential to become future leaders in research.

He was also selected for the Amgen Scholars Program at Stanford University, a highly prestigious, fully funded summer research fellowship to conduct cutting-edge biomedical research under the mentorship of Stanford faculty!

Congratulations to Joon Paek, from the Urs Lab, who won the 2025 Daniel T. O’Connor Young Investigator Travel Award at the annual ASPET meeting, which was held in Portland, Oregon this year. 

Congratulations to Kiara Fierman, from the Kopinke Lab, who won 3rd place with her poster titled "Digging for Desert Hedgehog: Identifying the source of the Hedgehog ligand during Skeletal Muscle Regeneration" in a poster competition at the Graduate Student Research Day.

Congratulations to Kelena Klippel, who won 1st Place in the BRAIN Center Poster Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Brain Injury Research at UF COM Celebration of Research. She's a Ph.D. student in Dr. Prodip Bose's lab. 

Congratulations to Rafael Abdelnor, from the Oliveira Lab, who matched in Family Medicine Residency- HCA Florida Ocala Hospital (class of 2025-2028). He has been researching with the Oliveira Lab for over a year. 

For the Pain Research & Integrated Neuroscience Symposium held on March 31, 2025 at the HPNP Auditorium at the University of Florida, where three of our researchers won awards for their posters.

Congratulations to Heather Allen, Ph.D. for being awarded First Place for her poster: “Parabrachial neuropeptide Y Y1 receptor neurons control persistent pain in rodents”. 

Congratulations to Niloofar Ghadirian, Ph.D. for being awarded Second Place for her poster: “Targeting CFTR mRNA with small molecules: a structure-based approach for cystic fibrosis”. 

Congratulations to Aida Calderon-Rivera, Ph.D. for being awarded Third Place for her poster: “Mouse models of non-dystrophic and dystrophic myotonia exhibit nociplastic pain-like behaviors”. 

Happy 2-Year anniversary with the PharmT family to Jamie Rule. 

Jamie works as the department's HR Generalist II.

In her free time, she likes to play the piano and bake. She also loves Mexican food and getting Elliano's coffee. 

Congratulations to Dr. Ghazaleh Behnammanesh, Dr. Bird's Postdoctoral Associate, who recently joined Retro Biosciences as a Cochlear Scientist within the Tissue Reprogramming team, based in Redwood City, California. Her work focuses on supporting the development of reprogramming-based rejuvenation therapies targeting age-related hearing loss.

Congratulations to Dr. Nikhil Urs for becoming a new Co-Director of the BMS Pharmacology & Therapeutics concentration.

The Department of Pharmacology & Therapeutics is proud to announce that Qingchen "Jeremy" Yuan, has been selected by the American Society of Hematology (ASH) to receive in the 2025 ASH Graduate Hematology Award, part of ASH’s investment hematology research and the next generation of hematology physicians and scientists.
Through this award, Jeremy will receive funding to conduct hematology research over a two-year period. Jeremy's project will focus on myloid cancer.

Congratulations to Dr. Lee Sweeney and collaborators for receiving the NIH P50 grant for his research titled "Addressing Shortcomings of AAV Gene Therapies for the Muscular Dystrophies". Dr. David Hammers is also a leader on this grant. Congratulations!

Congratulations to Dr. Holger Russ for receiving the NIH UG3 grant for his research titled "Understanding thymic epithelial and hematopoietic stem cell-intrinsic immune abnormalities". 

Congratulations to Dr. Gemma Casadesus and collaborators for receiving a grant award for their Fixel-Wilder Alzheimer’s, Tau and Amyloid program. 

We have recently changed our list servers for email distributions both to capture groups more accurately and also to allow moderation of messages so we don’t have issues with unwanted messaging.

Below is a table outlining the new listservs, including details on new list emails, members of each group, and moderation settings. Please keep this information for your reference and future use. These listservs are now active and should be used for all relevant communications moving forward. We will move to end the old listservs.

We have come up with a new process for handling invoices. No more signing packing slips and leaving them on your door. Miryam and Meagan will be pulling the invoice data from UFMarketplace and emailing a list of your invoices to you to see if they have been received.  

If you have or are wanting volunteers in your lab, please remember to have them fill out our Research Volunteer Request form. This includes undergraduate volunteers as well. 

There will be a new webpage on the website for searching through funding opportunities by research category. This will be done through Pivot-RP which connects to the UF Research Funding Discovery page.  

Apollo 2 profile pages have been updated to show presentations within the Publications section of a profile page. Presentations, posters, and other research activities can be updated in the UF Health Directory in the Publications section of your profile. 

Save the date for our annual departmental retreat coming up! October 6th from 8:30 AM to 5:30 PM, make sure to come by and check out all of the presentations!

The Pain Research & Integrated Neuroscience Symposium was held on March 31, 2025. Hosted by Dr. Rajesh Khanna at the Center for Advanced Pain Therapeutics and Research (CAPToR), there were several wonderful speakers and over 100 attendees. Thank you to those who spoke and joined. 

The PharmT family wanted to show our graduate students how much we appreciate them! Our faculty decided trade in the lab coat for a chef's hat and make breakfast for their students. Thank you to everyone that came and to our graduate students for all your hard work. We appreciate you!