Each month, the editors of three of the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutic’s (ASPET) journals choose who they call their Highlighted Trainee Authors. These early-career scientists are recognized for their innovative research published in The Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, Drug Metabolism and Disposition, and Molecular Pharmacology. This feature showcases selected young scientists, demonstrates what drives them, and reveals why pharmacology is important to them. This month we are featuring the July 2025 Highlighted Trainee Authors.
Catherine Demery
The Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics
Catherine Demery is a PhD Candidate at the University of Michigan Medical School. After exploring her scientific journey working as a chemist in industry, she realized that she wanted to return to the biomedical field. During her master’s program, while writing a review on genetic variation in alcoholism and opioid misuse susceptibility, she realized how happy she would be to spend the rest of her career doing research. Her choice to study drugs of abuse was not random but due to personal impact.
“I’ve always been interested in the pathologies associated with drugs of abuse, and that drove me to pursue a PhD in pharmacology with the goal of studying opioid abuse. I worked at the NIH for a year in the lab of Dr. Nardhy Gomez-Lopez before starting my PhD at U of M, and I am very grateful for her mentorship.”
Demery’s research focuses on fentanyl overdose to understand how we can better prevent or reverse fatal opioid overdoses. In the past few years, the U.S. has seen a dramatic rise in illicit fentanyl cut with xylazine, a sedative.
Her published work tests how the addition of xylazine affects fentanyl’s suppression of breathing, which is the lethal effect of opioids.
“I hope my work will improve our molecular understanding of opioid-induced respiratory depression and inform how the risk of overdose changes with different opioids or multiple substances,” she shares.
After graduating, Demery would like to pursue a postdoctoral position in academia. She is hoping to continue focusing on substance abuse but in a clinical setting.
When asked what it means to be published in The Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, Demery shares, “I am proud to have published my paper in a journal known for high-quality and impactful research from a society that has been a pillar of the field for over a century.”
Yue Gao
Drug Metabolism and Disposition
Yue Gao is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Pharmaceutical Science at Southern Medical University in China. Her advisor Professor Huichang Bi had a huge influence on her career development and decisions. Impressed by Professor Bi’s intellectual rigor, capacity to navigate complex scientific problems, and her guidance to conceptualize innovative projects, Gao was inspired to aim for her level of excellence.
Goa’s research focuses on the role of nuclear receptors (NRs) in regulating metabolism and liver diseases. Her published work demonstrates that hepatic retention of 1,4-bis [2-(3,5-dichloropyridyloxy)] benzene (TCPOBOP) is the fundamental cause of constant constitutive androstane receptor (CAR) activation and sustained hepatomegaly after drug withdrawal, which provided new data for the safety of CAR as a drug target and offered novel insights for CAR manipulation on liver diseases. Notably, when using TCPOBOP as a murine CAR agonist, attention should be paid to its hepatic accumulation and retention to avoid potential experimental biases and adverse effects.
She hopes that these works provide new targets, novel mechanisms, and innovative therapeutic strategies for liver regeneration or liver diseases.
Regarding future career plans, Gao shares, “I will further investigate the function and mechanisms of NRs in regulating metabolism and liver diseases, digging their novel physiological functions and thus provide new evidence for NRs as potential drug targets for liver diseases.”
For Gao, having an article published in Drug Metabolism and Disposition “is highly important for my professional development and is a great honor to me. It validates that my work does not just add data but provides new insights into NRs’ manipulation on liver diseases, which deeply encouraged me and will fuel my efforts to reach even higher goals in the future.”