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For Release: July 9, 2008
Contact: DMS Communications 603-650-1492

Pain Scientist Joyce DeLeo Named to Lead Pharmacology and Toxicology

Dr. Joyce A. DeLeo
Dr. Joyce A. DeLeo

Hanover, N.H.—Dartmouth Medical School pain researcher Dr. Joyce A. DeLeo has been appointed chair of the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, effective July 1. She succeeds Dr. Ethan Dmitrovsky, who is stepping aside after a decade as head of the department, to devote his full-time faculty effort at DMS to his research, particularly lung cancer biology and treatment, and including his work as an American Cancer Society Professor, an honor previously announced.

"I am pleased that Dr. DeLeo has agreed to take on this leadership opportunity, and thank Dr. Dmitrovsky for his outstanding scholarship and service," said Dr. William R. Green, DMS dean.

DeLeo, the Irene Heinz Given Professor of Pharmacology, is recognized for her research on chronic pain control. Her laboratory focuses on understanding the central nervous system and neuroimmune mechanisms that lead to debilitating nerve pain, as well as inflammatory, post-operative and low back pain. The results of her studies could translate into the development of new and effective approaches to alleviate and prevent chronic pain syndromes.

A DMS faculty member since 1991, DeLeo is a professor of anesthesiology and of pharmacology and toxicology and served as acting department chair in 2002-03. She was instrumental in developing and directing the interdisciplinary Neuroscience Center at Dartmouth, and was active in helping to establish a new interdisciplinary graduate training umbrella at DMS, the Program in Experimental and Molecular Medicine (PEMM).

An author of more 130 peer-reviewed manuscripts, reviews and chapters, DeLeo serves on numerous NIH study sections, international grant review boards and editorial boards. She was a 2001-2002 fellow in the Hedwig van Ameringen Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine Program and received the Dartmouth College inaugural Graduate Faculty Mentoring Award from the Office of Graduate Studies, in 2004.

DeLeo earned a PhD in pharmacology from the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in 1988 and did much of her pre-doctoral research at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Martinsried, Germany, under a Fulbright scholarship. Following a post-doctoral fellowship in neuroscience at Harvard, she came to Dartmouth as a post-doctoral fellow in the Anesthesia Research Laboratory.

-DMS-

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