left to right: Thurl Harris, PhD, Michelle Bland, PhD, and Kevin Lynch, PhD
For nearly five decades, UVA School of Medicine’s Training Program in Pharmacology has been funded continuously by NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences in the form of a Pharmacological Sciences Training Grant (PSTG). Indeed, this training grant’s 50th birthday will be on July 1 next year! The original four-digit award number T32 GM007055-48 was retired due to a change in the governing NIH PAR, but Pharmacology was recently awarded another T32 (GM148379) with hopes to continue that grant for decades more.
The initial award was made in 1975, within a year of President Nixon signing into law the National Research Service Award Act that resulted in T32 and F-series training awards. The first principal investigator (PI) of the PSTG was the late Bob Haynes, MD, PHD, professor emeritus of Pharmacology, who also instituted UVA’s long standing Medical Sciences Training Program.
Subsequent PIs of the PSTG include Carl Creutz, PhD, Kevin Lynch, PhD, and Julie Sando, PhD. Currently, the leadership team (MPIs) consists of Kevin Lynch, PhD, Michelle Bland, PhD and Thurl Harris, PhD, and the PSTG includes 25 participating faculty drawn from eight departments in the School of Medicine.
From its inception, the PSTG has supported a diverse set of nearly 200 trainees who have been awarded PhDs in Pharmacology, Biophysics, Neuroscience, Physiology, Pathology, Biochemistry, Microbiology, Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry and Biology. The PSTG’s success in 10 competitive renewal applications attests to the talents of many PSTG trainees, their faculty mentors and the research and training culture at the School of Medicine.