Dr. Emily Jutkiewicz
(1975–2024)
Dr. Emily Jutkiewicz, a member of ASPET since 2006, passed on September 21. She was the Past Chair of the Division for Behavioral Pharmacology and served on the editorial board of The Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.
Dr. Jutkiewicz graduated from Tufts University in 1997 with a B.S. degree, cum laude, in Biology. The seeds for her life-long interest in animal behavior and pharmacology were sown during an undergraduate project at Tufts with Klaus Miczek, but they developed more fully during her post-baccalaureate years in the laboratory of Dr. Jack Bergman at McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School.
At the University of Michigan as an associate professor of pharmacology, her research focused on investigating the developmental and opioid-related mechanisms contributing to psychiatric diseases, such as depression and addiction, particularly those involving delta opioid receptors (DOR). Agonists of DOR showed anticonvulsive and pain relieving activity, but also caused convulsions. She wanted to find a way to separate the two activities in order to develop safer DORs. Her lab showed that different signaling molecules (arrestins and Go-regulators of G-protein signaling) underlay the convulsive effects of the DOR as opposed to its antihyperalgesic and antidepressant-like effects, thus opening the door to development of a safer delta opioid agonist.
Dr. Jutkiewicz’s expertise in animal behavior and her understanding of so many facets of pharmacology led to numerous collaborations with scientists within and outside of the university. Her skill at behavioral pharmacology was integral to the research of others. In 2018 she was awarded the Basic Sciences Teaching Award in Pharmacology, and in 2022 she was awarded the Master’s Mentoring Award from the University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School.
Please read the full obituary written by former ASPET President, Dr. Margaret Gnegy.
Dr. George Alton Dunaway, Jr.
(1941–2024)
Dr. George Alton Dunaway, Jr., an ASPET member for 20 years, served on the Society’s program committee, as chair of the Division for Pharmacology Education, on the web advisory committee, and was a member of the Division for Molecular Pharmacology.
Dr. Dunaway was an emeritus professor of pharmacology at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, where he spent his entire career as a faculty member and researcher from 1975–2010. His research focused on the diversity of PFK subunits found in several human organs and his work on phosphofructokinase, or PFK, isoenzymes contributed to our understanding of glycolysis.
Dr. In addition to his numerous published research articles, he contributed three DNA sequences to the National Institutes of Health GenBank and contributed to the textbook “Brody’s Human Pharmacology: Molecular to Clinical” as an associate editor, editing the section on drugs affecting the endocrine system. Image credit: ASBMB