SUBJECT:  Interim Chair of the Department of Pharmacology

I am delighted to announce that Joan Heller Brown, Ph.D., professor of pharmacology, has agreed to serve as Interim Chair of the Department of Pharmacology while we conduct a national search for a permanent chair. She succeeds Palmer Taylor, Ph.D., who was recently named founding Dean of the new UCSD School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Associate Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences.

Dr. Heller Brown is a distinguished and prolific researcher whose laboratory focuses on signaling mechanisms regulating cell growth in glial cells and in the cardiovascular system. She has published more than 100 papers and chapters in a variety of journals and is a contributor to the textbooks Basic Neurochemistry and Goodman and Gilman's Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics.

A member of the UCSD faculty since 1975, Dr. Heller Brown has served as chair of UCSD's Biomedical Sciences Graduate Program, and as a member of the Faculty Council, the Faculty of Basic Biomedical Sciences Council, and the dean's Space Advisory Committee. She has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Cellular Signaling, Molecular Interventions and Nature Reviews Drug Discovery. She has been editor of the premier journal in contemporary pharmacology, Molecular Pharmacology, for the past three years.

Dr. Heller Brown earned her undergraduate degree in neurobiology from Cornell University and her Ph.D. from Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She conducted her postdoctoral studies at the University of Colorado prior to joining the UCSD faculty. She is a member of the Society for Neurosciences, the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics and the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and is a fellow of the American Heart Association.

I am confident that Dr. Heller Brown will provide strong leadership for a department that has become one of the preeminent programs in pharmacology in the nation under the chairmanship of Palmer Taylor. The department was recently ranked third in the nation in research impact by the Institute for Scientific Information, and is consistently one of the top two programs in NIH funding.

                                                Edward W. Holmes, M.D.
                                                Vice Chancellor, Health Sciences
                                                Dean, School of Medicine