Since graduating from UB, my biggest professional achievement has been becoming an integral member of the Designer Drug Research Unit at the National Institute on Drug Abuse Intramural Research Program, where I now serve as a Staff Scientist. That is especially meaningful to me because it represents more than a title. It reflects the trust to help move collaborative research forward on emerging psychoactive substances and potential therapeutics with real public health relevance. My work now spans molecular, cellular, and behavioral pharmacology, and I also get to contribute to mentoring and team science. PMY at UB gave me a strong foundation in pharmacology and research training that made obtaining this role possible.

The best part of PMY was the community. One of UB’s real strengths is that students have meaningful access to faculty, so your training is not limited to just one lab or one mentor. I trained in Dr. Dubocovich’s lab, but I also learned a great deal from other faculty. The PMY staff were also a huge part of making the program supportive and student-centered (specific shout out to Liz, Martin, Debbie, and Linda!). We also had mentoring and professional development opportunities such as CLIMB, and connections across biomedical programs. For anyone considering PMY, that combination of rigor, accessibility, and community is a major advantage. Plus, Buffalo is a fantastic area of the country to spend a few years of your life. There is lots to do in Western New York, and Canada isn’t far.

I would tell my younger PMY self to embrace every opportunity to grow and expand my network. It is easy in graduate school to focus only on experiments, but some of the most important parts of a scientific career come from the people you meet, the mentors who invest in you, and the collaborations you build over time. Opportunities through PMY, CLIMB, seminars, and conferences can open doors in ways you may not recognize right away. Looking back, amazing colleagues and collaborators have been key to every stage of my career, and I would remind my younger self not to underestimate how important those relationships are in academic science.

The one lesson from PMY that I have made the most of is that basic pharmacology really matters. Dose-response studies, time-course experiments, and careful attention to time of testing are essential if you want to interpret drug effects correctly in cellular and preclinical studies. In the Dubocovich lab, a core part of our training was learning that when you test a drug can be just as important as what dose you test, especially in relation to the light-dark cycle and circadian biology. Without those fundamentals, conclusions about drug action can be incomplete or even misleading. Dr. Rick Rabin and Dr. Jerry Winter especially reinforced the importance of dose-response and time-course work, and that mindset still shapes how I approach pharmacology and experimental design today.

I have always been interested in how drugs affect the brain and behavior, but over time I became even more interested in the “why” behind those effects. Early experiences in behavioral research got me interested in drug action at the systems level, and PMY gave me the deeper mechanistic training to connect behavior with receptor pharmacology, experimental design, and interpretation of data. That combination is what led me to primarily study the neuropharmacology of emerging psychoactive substances and potential therapeutics. I like that this work sits at the intersection of basic science and public health, where careful pharmacology can directly inform how we understand risk and identify better treatments.

As a staff scientist, I think of my main expertise as translational neuropharmacology, linking molecular pharmacology with behavioral effects in preclinical models. In practice, that means using receptor and transporter data, dose-response relationships, and validated behavioral assays to understand how drugs work and what their risks or therapeutic potential may be. That expertise is definitely a combination of both formal training and hands-on experience. PMY gave me the core scientific framework, and my work since then has expanded that through collaborative research, troubleshooting complex studies, and learning how to interpret data across different experimental systems.

Honestly, I try to celebrate successes one step at a time. Science moves quickly, and there is always another experiment, manuscript, or deadline waiting, so I have learned to pause and really take in each milestone as it comes when I can. Sometimes that means sharing good news with colleagues, sometimes it means appreciating that a project finally worked, and sometimes it is just recognizing how much effort a team put into getting to that point. I think it is important to appreciate the smaller wins along the way, because those moments really do add up over time. Also, try to express appreciation for the critical support staff (animal care technicians, veterinarians, core staff) who often play critical, but unacknowledged roles in most scientific research. These people help keep the wheels of science rolling.

I would love to teach a class on how we figure out what a drug actually does, starting from receptors and signaling to behavior and relevant public health impacts. Students often learn drug names or drug classes, but the really interesting part is understanding how we determine potency, efficacy, mechanism, and safety through experiments. I would want the class to cover dose-response, time-course design, structure-activity relationships, and why biological context and time of testing can completely change the interpretation of a result. For reading, I would start with foundational pharmacology from a text such as Goodman & Gilman, then pair that with a few primary research papers showing how careful experimental design leads to better science.

I did not realize that I wanted to be a scientist until I was in college, but I was always curious about how people think and behave. That curiosity first drew me toward psychology and eventually toward biology and pharmacology, where I realized that drugs can be powerful tools for understanding the brain. The skills that carried over most were curiosity, observation, and the habit of asking why (just ask my parents- ha!). Those are still some of the most important skills I use every day as a scientist. In many ways, the path changed over the years, but the core motivations and curiosities have stayed the same.