Appointments:

Brian Mathur, PhD, Professor, Department of Pharmacology & Physiology, has been appointed as Co-Director of the University of Maryland school of Medicine Physician Scientist Training Program (MSTP).

Grants & Contracts:

Vincent C. O. Njar, PhD, Professor, and Purushottamachar Puranik, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department Pharmacology and Physiology, in collaboration with researchers at Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia received a five-year, $3,971,150 grant from the National Institute of Health (NIH)/ National Cancer Institute (NCI) for the project titled “Second-Generation Stat5 inhibitors for Prostate Cancer Therapy.” Marja Nevalainen, MD, PhD (contact) and Vincent Njar, PhD are the Principal Investigators of this grant award. The Project Period Start Date is 07/17/2026 and the End Date is 06/30/2031.

Chozha Rathinam, PhD, Associate Professor, Department  of Pharmacology &  Physiology, Program in Oncology, UMGCCC has received a four year $1,555,000 R01 grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NIH/NHLBI) for “Modeling and treating chronic HIV-induced lung infections & cancer”.

Presentations, Events, Lectures & Workshops:

Thomas Blanpied, PhD, Professor and Vice-chair, Department of Pharmacology and Physiology, presented an invited lecture at a special meeting of The Physiological Society held June 30 to July 1, 2026 at University College London to celebrate the 150^th anniversary of the Society. The topic of his lecture was “Nanoarchitectural regulation of NMDAR-mediated synaptic transmission.”

Robert J. Bloch, PhD, Professor, Department of Pharmacology and Physiology, will be chairing a session and presenting at the 2027 MDA Clinical & Scientific Conference, held in Orlando, Florida, on March 21–24, 2027. The title of the talk is “Cross-Disease Insights in Muscle Biology.”

Martina Damenti, PhD, postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Pharmacology and Physiology and the lab of Thomas Blanpied delivered an invited lecture at the Synaptic Transmission Gordon Research Conference held in Il Ciocco, Italy in July, 2026. The topic of her talk was, “Direct measurement of conformational state of intrinsically disordered regions of NMDA receptors in neurons using light microscopy.”

Emily DeMarco, graduate student in the Program in Neuroscience and the lab of Thomas Blanpied delivered an invited lecture at the Molecular and Cellular Neurobiology Gordon Research Conference held in Il Ciocco, Italy in July, 2026. The topic of her talk was “Nano-organization of presynaptic adhesion molecule PTPσ near sites of synaptic vesicle fusion.” 

Publications:

Wei Li, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Institute for Health Computing and Department of Pharmacology and Physiology, was the co-corresponding author of "Single cell CRISPR screen identifies antagonism between Nsd1-H3K36me2 and Ezh2-H3K27me3 orchestrates pluripotency transition”, which was published in Stem Cell Reports on August 11, 2026.

Brian N. Mathur, PhD, Professor, Department of Pharmacology and Physiology , was among the co-authors of “Pain in the claustrum” which was published in Neurobiology of Pain on August 7th, 2026.

Michele Vitolo, PhD, Assistant Professor of Pharmacology and Physiology and Stuart Martin, PhD, Professor and Chair of Pharmacology and Physiology coauthored two publications.

1. “The Pro-Metastatic Roles of ROS,” which was published in Antioxidants (Basel) on April 22, 2026 
2. “Melanoma cell adhesion molecule (MCAM) mediates microtentacle generation, homotypic clustering, and reattachment of non-adherent breast tumor cells,” which was published in Breast Cancer Research on July 17, 2026.