Student Collaborators

As a professor of anesthesiology and pharmacology, a researcher on chronic pain for 20 years, and the principal investigator for numerous grants from the National Institutes of Health that total $7 million, Joyce DeLeo, Ph.D., has known her share of professional success. Still, DeLeo considers mentoring students and fellows "the highlight of my career" and "the best part of being the director of a lab."

DeLeo and her student collaborators work in drug development to treat chronic pain, and literally go from basic science to humans. "We are trying to come up with agents we can use as adjuvants together with opioids, so we don't have to use as high a dose," she explains. "We can bring things to translational research—bench to bedside—very easily." She cites one patent for a glial modulating agent that represents an entirely new class of drug. "We have licensed the patent to go forward with clinical trials."

DeLeo is "passionate" about exposing students to neuroscience in the classroom and in the lab, and loves to see them in the thick of it as she and clinical colleagues collectively ask the tough questions and seek answers: How do we assess pain? What are the

best drugs? "It's a unique experience for students to be a part of these kinds of exchanges as they are training," she says.

According to M.D.- Ph.D. student Vivianne Tawfik, DeLeo is not only a great researcher and role model, but also one of the main reasons she chose Dartmouth. Tawfik was intrigued with the idea of looking at problems seen in the clinic with a new perspective,

by studying them in animal or molecular models. "Joyce encouraged me to be independent as soon as I came into the lab," Tawfik says. "She wanted me to write a grant and come up with my own ideas. We meet regularly to go over progress," adds Tawfik. Joyce really has allowed me, as well as others in the lab, to go "where we want to go with our projects."