The University of Maryland School of Medicine Department of Pharmacology and Physiology hosted Dr. Mark Nelson, PhD, of the University of Vermont on June 22 for a distinguished lecture in honor of the new Mordecai P. Blaustein, MD and Ellen B. Blaustein Faculty Scholar Professorship.

Established in part with a significant philanthropic gift from Ellen and Dr. Blaustein, who retired from a long career at UMSOM in 2021, the professorship will support an innovative physician-scientist in researching cellular and molecular mechanisms of physiology.

“This endowment of more than $1.5 million will allow the recruitment of an outstanding new researcher to the Department of Pharmacology and Physiology and also serve as a permanent foundation to support ongoing expertise in physiology,” Stuart Martin, PhD, Chair of the UMSOM Department of Pharmacology and Physiology, said in his opening remarks at the lecture.

UMSOM recruited Dr. Blaustein in 1979 to serve as Chair of the Department of Physiology, a role he served in until 2003. He spent his 24 years in the role building a research program that made seminal discoveries of the roles of ion pumps in the regulation of blood pressure and mentoring students and junior faculty.

“Dr. Blaustein really recruited many of the senior faculty who formed the core of the department, and has built a lasting legacy of outstanding expertise in molecular and cellular physiology,” Dr. Martin said. “The impact of his inspiring mentorship has extended literally across generations, and with the establishment of the Blaustein Faculty Scholar Professorship, this impact will now be forever."

One of those researchers Dr. Blaustein mentored is Dr. Nelson, with Dr. Blaustein serving as his PhD adviser. Dr. Nelson’s research career, like his mentor’s, has focused on ion channels and blood flow, and specifically how cerebral blood flow is regulated by electrical activity in the brain, with major implications for the treatment of both stroke and dementia. Highlighting the ongoing cycle of mentorship, Dr. Nelson then served as the postdoctoral advisor for Dr. Tom Longden, who was recruited as an assistant professor to the department in 2019.

From left-to-right: Sidney Cahn, Laura Cahn, Madeline Cahn, Bruce Krueger, Ellen Blaustein, Mark Nelson, Mordecai Blaustein, Mark Blaustein, Jessica Blaustein, Stuart Martin, Jon Lederer

There are around 500 miles of blood vessels in the human brain and about 95% of them are not large arteries, but small capillaries about a quarter of the width of a human hair, Dr. Nelson explained in his lecture. When a nerve cell in the brain fires an electrical signal, called an action potential, potassium ions carrying a positive electric charge flow out of the cell. Dr. Nelson and his colleagues discovered that these potassium ions then trigger the cells that make up capillary walls to relax and allow more blood flow to the nerve cell that fired the signal.

“It’s not just nerve cells sending signals, but capillaries sending signals that say, ‘let’s deliver more blood right now!’,” Dr. Nelson said. “So you can imagine these capillaries as both tubes delivering blood and electrically coupled wires.”

Understanding how this capillary electrical coupling controls healthy blood flows in the brain could help lead to interventions for cases where blood flow is disrupted, such as in stroke. The physician-scientist ultimately recruited to fill the new professorship would ideally bring a strong background in similar cellular membrane physiology and experience translating fundamental scientific discoveries into therapies.

The professorship was first announced in 2024. In addition to the philanthropic gift from Dr. Blaustein and Mrs. Blaustein, funding for the new endowed professorship came from the Maryland E-Innovation Initiative Fund (MEIF), a state program administered by the Maryland Department of Commerce that was created to spur basic and applied research in scientific and technical fields at the colleges and universities.