Chair's Welcome

Welcome to the Department of Pharmacology at Yale School of Medicine, one of the School’s – and Yale’s – core departments in basic biomedical sciences. We are 25 primary faculty and 17 secondary faculty focused together on understanding the molecular basis of drug action in all disease contexts.

I am often asked just what is pharmacology? To answer this question, one only needs to look up any of the key current activities in biomedical research: integrative biology, signaling, metabolism, biological chemistry, pharmacogenetics, antivirals, systems biology, and neuropharmacology to name a few – and the definition will essentially be that of modern pharmacology. At Yale Pharmacology, we are very proud of our mechanistic and quantitative tradition, which has its roots in the first applications of chemotherapy in the 1940s, the focus on biochemical pharmacology fostered by Arnold Welch, antiviral pharmacology pioneered by Prusoff, and development of targeted cancer therapies by Yossi Schlessinger.

The Department that these luminaries defined and built forms a vibrant and diverse intellectual community of world-class current faculty, students, and postdocs who are at the very forefront of modern pharmacology research. And it continues to grow as we recruit new faculty in key emerging areas of modern molecular medicine – with a strong commitment to increasing the diversity of the Department. We work closely together in many cross-disciplinary collaborations, and the Department includes experts in a wide array of state-of-the-art methods. Our faculty are also a dedicated group of educators in the Pharmacology Graduate Program and the NIH-funded Predoctoral Pharmacology Training Program that the Department hosts, as well as the Pharmacology Thread of Yale’s MD Program.

It’s not all work, though. With Pharmacology Happy Hours, biweekly RIP talks, many named lectures given by leading lights, and an annual off campus retreat, we like to think of ourselves as an inclusive pharmacology phamily where science is fun and important and cutting edge.

Mark A. Lemmon, Ph.D., F.R.S.
Alfred Gilman Professor and Chair of Pharmacology