Welcome to the Department of Pharmacology

Message from the Chair

Nancy C. Walworth, PhD

Welcome to the Department of Pharmacology at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.  

The Department of Pharmacology is committed to fulfilling its roles in education, research, and service. Our faculty members educate medical, graduate, and undergraduate students in the classroom and in the laboratory; carry out research at the forefront of biomedical science while training the next generation of research scientists; and serve the medical school, university, national and international scientific communities. We strive to be a department where all are welcome, empowered to do their best work, and respected for their contributions. 

Areas of research in the department include signaling and gene expression; host-pathogen interactions; genetics, metabolism, and liver disease; ion channel pharmacology; cancer biology and pharmacology; translational pharmacology; therapeutic target identification; and drug discovery. Faculty research programs are supported by extramural support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Department of Defense, New Jersey Commission for Cancer Research, American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, and numerous other foundations and agencies, as well as through corporate research contracts.  
 
Faculty members play active roles in graduate student training through Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences Graduate Programs including the Graduate Programs in Molecular Biosciences for PhD students and the Master of Biomedical Sciences program. Our faculty are committed to building a diverse and inclusive biomedical research workforce through leadership of the NIH-funded Initiative for Maximizing Student Development T32 training grant.  

Recent recruitment of new faculty to the department has diversified our research programs, with the addition of Dr. Lauren Poole and Dr. Ricardo Martínez Zamudio, and through a collaborative effort with the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine, Dr. Conor McClenaghan and Dr. Alexander Valvezan.  

We are proud to count amongst our faculty those with appointments at the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey and the RWJMS Child Health Institute. In addition to working with Rutgers institutes and centers committed to basic and translational science, we collaborate successfully with our colleagues in the RWJMS Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and Neuroscience & Cell Biology departments as we work to expand biomedical research at RWJMS through faculty recruitment.   

Please explore the research interests of our faculty, become familiar with the Department of Pharmacology, and contact us with any questions. 

Nancy C. Walworth, PhD  
Professor and Chair