Subject:  School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences Dean

I am very pleased to announce that Palmer Taylor, Ph.D., Chair of the UCSD Department of Pharmacology, has been selected to serve as founding dean of the new UCSD School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, following a national search. He begins his duties immediately. He also assumes the title of Associate Vice Chancellor for Health Sciences.

Dr. Taylor, who also holds the Sandra and Monroe Trout Chair in Pharmacology, is a respected scientist and Institute of Medicine member whose laboratory focuses on the structure, function and gene expression of receptors and enzymes involved in neurotransmission.

Palmer Taylor is nationally recognized as a leader in pharmacology research, and he has played a leading role in developing this new School and assuring that it will truly be a program for the 21st century. Dr. Taylor is both a pharmacist and a pharmaceutical scientist, a wonderful combination for this new school. He brings to the position a solid sense of the program's history, and an inspired vision for its future. With a proven track record as a leader and master educator, and a background that uniquely integrates the practice of pharmacy and the science of pharmacology, I know this school will soon achieve a position among the nation's top-ranking pharmacy schools.

Dr. Taylor joined the UCSD Department of Medicine faculty in 1970 and has been chair of the UCSD Department of Pharmacology since its inception in 1987. Prior to joining UCSD, he held a fellowship at the National Institutes of Health from 1968-70, followed by an NIH continuation fellowship that allowed him to work with the prestigious Max Planck Institut fur Physikalsche Chemie in Gottingen, Germany. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Wisconsin after completing a baccalaureate degree in Pharmacy.

He is a former president of the American Society for Pharmacology & Experimental Therapeutics. He has been a member of the National Advisory Council of the National Institutes of General Medical Sciences, the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health, and a Congressional Task Force on Environmental Health Sciences, and he served as a delegate to the International Union of Pharmacology and the Council of Academic Societies of the American Association on Medical Colleges.

Please join me in congratulating Dr. Taylor, and in welcoming the Charter Class of the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences as we officially mark the opening of UCSD's newest professional school.

                                                Edward W. Holmes, M.D.
                                                Vice Chancellor,
                                                Health Sciences