I gradulated from Macalester College in 1978 with BA with honors concentrating in Physiological Psychology. After graduation, I worked for two years in the Hypertension Division at University of Minnesota under the direction of Silvia Azar, MD and Louis Tobian, MD. Silvia and I worked on the role of the brain in salt-sensitive hypertension and the effects of excess dietary salt on stress-related behavior.
I went to graduate school in Chicago at Northwestern University School of Medicine, where after extensive coursework taken side by side with the medical students, I did research in the Pharmacology Department on receptors for stress hormones. My main mentor was David U'Prichard, who departed before I graduated and went on to great success in the pharmaceutical industry. As part of this research, I did my first studies on weight cycling, better known as the yo-yo syndrome. In September 1984 I moved to New York City to work at Cornell Unveristy College of Medicine.
In my postdoctoral work, I focused on the control of circulatory system by the nervous system and the biochemical processes that are involved. This led to studies of blood pressure lowering drugs that work withint hte brain. I discovered a new protein involved in the control of blood pressure, the imidazoline receptor, whose existence had been proposed by Pascal Bousquet in Strasbourg, France. Initial observatoins were published in 1986 and 1987.
| Add your text here |