Dr. Paul Greengard, head of the Laboratory of Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience at The Rockefeller University and co-recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, will speak at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) on Wednesday, January 10th at 11:00 a.m.
His lecture, "Signal transduction pathways used by therapeutic agents and drugs of abuse," is sponsored by the UCSD Neurosciences Graduate Program and Department of Pharmacology. The free lecture is open to the public, and will be presented at Mandeville Auditorium on the UCSD campus in La Jolla.
Greengard, Eric Kandel and Arvid Carlsson were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system. Greengard’s work has contributed to the understanding of how dopamine and a number of other neurotransmitters – specialized chemical messengers that send signals from one cell to another – work in the central nervous system. Signaling abnormalities by dopamine are associated with several neurological disorders, including Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and substance abuse.
He has also shown that many of the therapeutic and toxic effects of several classes of common antipsychotic, hallucinogenic and antidepressant drugs can be explained in terms of the distinct neurochemical actions by which they affect the transmission of nerve signals in the brain.
Funding for the lecture was provided in part by a Neuroplasticity of Aging Training Grant from the National Institutes of Health. For more information please contact Lisa Kurtz at lmkurtz@ucsd.edu
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Media Contact: Debra Kain, 619-543-6163, ddkain@ucsd.edu