An interview with three distinguished members of ASPET about the society, and how it helped them navigate their careers.
As our field adapts to new technologies, unpredictable federal policies, and evolving academic structures, ASPET must similarly adapt to best serve our members. As these three interviews with distinguished ASPET members makes clear, change is something that every scientist must expect, and membership in ASPET can be an invaluable aid in both developing career paths and furthering research.
Dr. Kyle Palmer, PhD
Dr. Kyle Palmer, PhDA member of ASPET since 2003, Kyle Palmer has been involved with numerous committees and task forces, and served as President for the Mid-Atlantic Pharmacology Society. He is the co-founder of Opertech Bio and now serves as that company’s Chief Science Office and Chief Operations Officer. Prior to Opertech Bio, Dr. Palmer worked with Redpoint Bio and the Schering-Plough Research Institute.
Dr. Margaret Gnegy, PhD
Dr. Margaret Gnegy, PhDA former President of ASPET, Margaret Gnegy joined the society in 1981. She is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Michigan Medical School. She was elected as a Councilor of ASPET in 2014, and as Secretary/Treasurer-Elect in 2017, before being elected President in 2021.
Dr. Edmund Sybertz, PhD
Dr. Edmund Sybertz, PhDEdmund Sybertz joined ASPET in 1982. He served on the Scientific Advisory Board at Syndexa Pharmaceuticals Corporation, Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, and Lysosomal Therapeutics. Dr. Sybertz was the Senior Vice-President of Drug Discovery and Development at Genzyme Corporation, as well as Senior Vice-President of Scientific Affairs, the head of R&D at GelTex Pharmaceuticals, and held various positions at the Schering-Plough Research Institute.
What led you to join ASPET, and at what stage in your career did you join?
Palmer: I originally started going to ASPET meetings when I was a graduate student, but I didn’t start my membership until later, when I was an established scientist. My wife is also a scientist and, at that stage of our lives—beginning a family, with my wife in the academic sector—it was more important for her to go to meetings or conferences. When the kids were old enough, I resumed my membership.
Gnegy: I attended ASPET meetings during my postdoctoral years in the Laboratory of Preclinical Pharmacology directed by Dr. Erminio Costa. I did not become a member, however, until I had served as an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan for 4 years. At that time, you had to be carefully ‘vetted’ to be an ASPET member; you had to demonstrate your commitment and productivity in the discipline.
Sybertz: I joined in 1982. I started my graduate career in pharmacology at the University of Minnesota in 1973 and finished my PhD in 1977. I then went on to a postdoc at the University of Virginia in the pharmacology department, and after that did thirty years in the pharmaceutical biotech industry.
The training I had in the laboratory in Minnesota was in vivo pharmacology and physiology. The skills I picked up there were very conducive to what the industry was looking for at the time, and there were very few jobs in academia. Having seen a number of other people who had gone into industry, I realized that I could do as much publishable research in an industrial setting as in an academic one.
“ASPET has always been recognized as being the premier organization for pharmacology, and to be a member at that time was really an early-stage current goal and milestone for all of us entering the field. And I think it’s continued to be that way. It served as a very important early-stage career milestone for networking. I published extensively in the journals. It was just a natural evolution of my career.” – Dr. Edmund Sybertz, PhD
What has been the biggest change you’ve seen in ASPET during your time as a member?
Gnegy: There have been many changes and it’s hard to pick out just one. A big change has been in membership inclusivity. When I first joined, most of the members were male professors. It has been a slow movement to widen ASPET’s horizons but it is happening. In the past few years, ASPET has actively pursued accessibility and inclusivity. This has very much been to the society’s credit.
Palmer: The separation from experimental biology was a big one. The meetings back then were enormous, and ASPET always has fantastic programming, but you could also see fantastic programming from the other societies that were part of that conference.
Another change has been the drop in industry participation, membership, and representation, but that’s one of the reasons why Harshini Neelakantan and I have started the Industry Science Committee. In interviews we’ve done, or just through casual conversations with people from the industry, there is a general sentiment that big pharma has contracted. The concern about resources, and their cost, is viewed as a bottom-line “what’s our return on our investment?” And if the investment is simply seen as keeping their scientists a part of a community, those companies don’t really see that as a worthwhile investment. They’ll only send their employees to a meeting if there is programming that’s particularly relevant to some major project at the company.
Sybertz: I’ll highlight three changes, all of which were beneficial for the society and the field:
The first is that the membership, as I was joining, consisted of people trained in pharmacology and going into a pharmacology-oriented environment: departments in academia, drug discovery, pharmacology departments and industry. Over the years, the membership base has broadened quite extensively. The science is no longer as siloed as it might have been in those earlier days. You don’t have to be a pharmacologist now, you just need the passion and ability to study chemicals, and what they do to biological systems, in this broader sense.
Second was the establishment of different divisions as the membership has grown over the years, alongside the diversity of science that went on in the field. Setting up these divisions made a lot of sense, so I could get engaged with the cardiovascular division or the drug discovery division, which were the two that were of the most interest to me.
Finally, ASPET moved with the technology and supported its members by providing resources that would let them engage in areas where technology would continue to advance.
“ASPET has been a particularly good home for pharmacology students. In my later years, getting to see former students is a true highlight of the annual meeting.” – Dr. Margaret Gnegy, PhD
What’s been the most valuable aspect of your membership?
Gnegy: I find it difficult to choose one valuable aspect, but I think I could sum it up as the people. People, in this case, takes many forms. People, as in the scientists who present their best work at the meetings; people, as in meeting one’s colleagues and fostering these relationships; people, as in one’s students. ASPET has been a particularly good home for pharmacology students. In my later years, getting to see former students is a true highlight of the annual meeting.
Palmer: The scientific community is so valuable—it not only keeps me informed, but connected. And then the broad range of programming. If you’re in industry, like I am, it’s unlikely you’ll stay in one particular area of focus for very long. I started off in behavioral pharmacology, then cardiovascular, molecular, signaling, and immunology, and now I’ve kind of gone sort of full circle. I’m back into behavioral pharmacology, but with a completely different focus. Instead of behavioral pharmacology focusing on drugs of abuse, I’m focusing on chemosensory function.
I’ve always been able to go to an ASPET meeting and find interesting symposia on any of those topics, or related to anything that I’m doing.
Sybertz: It would be the networking, the access to the publications, and the meetings. That was a chance to meet and socialize and discuss science with colleagues. And ASPET was the mechanism that was able to bring that all together for us. It still is.
What was the first ASPET meeting or conference you attended? What was it like? Was it different from meetings that take place in 2025?
Gnegy: Oh, that is very difficult to answer. I suspect it was in 1975 or 1976. I was a postdoctoral student. Large yearly meetings were run through FASEB, but there were smaller meetings in the fall run by ASPET. Those were my favorites; there were fewer scientists in total, but all were focused on pharmacology. It was like being in a most enjoyable club. I find it delightful that the national meetings are run by ASPET again. It may be limiting in some scientific aspects, but it really helps the feeling of camaraderie and shared experiences of the attendees.
Palmer: It might have been in Atlanta back in the early 1990s? I remember presenting my poster and that’s always exciting for a graduate student. And I was excited to hear eminent scientists give excellent presentations. The quality of the science is always top notch, but so is the level of scientific rigor. The audiences are always respectful, but they pay close attention to the data and what your claims are. You can expect the audience to point out something that may be overreached as far as a conclusion goes, or maybe the data or methods aren’t quite so clear. That impressed me right from the beginning, and has stuck with me ever since.
I compare that to other major meetings I’ve attended, and I’ve wondered “how is it that these folks are really getting away with what they’re claiming?” Nobody’s challenging them in the audience.
Sybertz: The first scientific meeting I went to was as a graduate student, a FASEB meeting in Atlantic City. I wasn’t presenting at it, but it gave me a chance to get exposed to scientific discourse in that setting. The first pharmacology meeting that I attended was in Davis, California, and I put together a poster and presented at that meeting. Those findings evolved into my PhD thesis. And that was really a pretty cool experience for someone that was just getting started out.
Can you describe the importance mentoring has played in your career, either as a mentor or mentee?
Gnegy: Mentoring has been a significant part of my career. While I don’t feel that I was strongly mentored as a student, I did have professors who guided me at key moments in my life. I always felt strongly about properly mentoring young scientists, whether they were students or beginning faculty. As a result, I have reaped great rewards from seeing their successes. I have remained close to many of my students. In addition to my personal students, I chaired the graduate program in our pharmacology department for about twenty years. As such, I mentored approximately one hundred of our students, some of whom actually became faculty. Working with students has been a joy to me. In 2009, I received the Rackham Distinguished Faculty Mentoring Award, a source of great pride to me.
Palmer: One of the most important duties of a scientist is mentorship. I’ve had some really outstanding mentors, and it’s very clear that mentorship will have an impact on people at the earliest stages of their career. A mentor wants to make sure this impact is positive, because this is how the overall enterprise of science grows. This is how it advances. You have quality people doing quality work and they have to be enthusiastic about it. They have to embrace that value system. So that’s something that good mentorship does for an individual. They pass it on to the next generation.
Early on, I was in graduate school at Rutgers for a biopsychology program, and I decided, “You know what? This isn’t really what I want to do for a career.” I went to the University of Michigan and worked at a very renowned behavioral pharmacology lab run by Jim Woods and Gail Winger. I was working as a tech, and that experience convinced me that pharmacology is what I want to do. Jim and Gail were fantastic; they just really turned me on to pharmacology. And then I went to grad school at Michigan and my mentor was Steve Fisher and, again, I can’t say enough good things about him. He recognized that, because I was older than all the rest of my classmates, I required a different kind of mentorship. He was extremely helpful to me, and I’ve never forgotten that. Later on in my career, when I was actually an established scientist starting off in biotech, my mentor was Ray Salemme, who had been one of the earliest x-ray crystallographers. Ray was brilliant. He was the kind of person that, if he saw you had some insight, creativity, and drive, he would let you do just about anything you wanted to do, and he would be there to support and guide you. It gave me the self-confidence and the thrill of discovery to eventually found my own company and invent my own technology.
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Sybertz: My thesis advisor Ben Zimmerman was a very important mentor. He was an outstanding scientist and set a wonderful personal and professional example in the laboratory. He was very much hands-on and very much an individualist, and expected his students to also be able to do any experiment and learn any technique to answer a scientific problem. I learned a lot from him. My postdoctoral mentor was Michael Peach, who was really a visionary scientist at the University of Virginia, and I just learned a lot about Cellular Biology and Angiotensin biology from him that helped me all through my career. He was one of the stars in that Virginia department which ultimately produced two or three Nobel laureates. Unfortunately, he passed away at a young age.
As I transitioned into industry, I became the mentor, both as a manager of other people and as someone who would help scientists learn to navigate both the science, and the organizational challenges that come with working in industry. This included helping people understand what it’s like to work within a team organization, and the importance of flexibility.
“In an industrial setting, you don’t always have control over what you’re studying. Projects come and go. Areas of research come and go. You need to be adaptable and flexible enough to be able to go through that. It’s important to teach that level of flexibility and, in the case where perhaps the scientific quality wasn’t where it should be, to instill that rigor.” – Dr. Edmund Sybertz, PhD
Can you describe a time when an ASPET publication was important to your career—maybe a major paper that you published, or maybe a breakthrough in the field that you first learned about through an ASPET journal?
Gnegy: Two of my earliest papers as an independent scientist were published in Molecular Pharmacology (MolPharm) and The Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (JPET). The MolPharm paper, involving a study of dopamine and calcium-sensitive adenylyl cyclase, defined a path of research that lasted for a number of years. However, a 1998 paper in JPET, describing the effect of protein kinase C inhibitors on amphetamine-stimulated dopamine release, defined the path of research for the remainder of my career. Before I retired, we were developing PKC inhibitors that blocked amphetamine-stimulated rewarding behaviors. So I would say that 1998 JPET paper was a very important one for me.
Palmer: An important publication that I had in Molecular Pharmacology was one in which I demonstrated that ATP was a partial agonist at the human P2Y1 receptor. At the time there was confusion over the pharmacological profiles that were used to distinguish purinergic receptors; there were no selective antagonists, most of the agonists were nucleotides susceptible to modification by cell surface enzymes, and differences in intrinsic efficacy were unknown. This paper clarified the pharmacology of the human P2Y1 receptor; the results, in the context of other evidence, implied the existence of a second ADP receptor necessary for full platelet aggregation (the discovery of the P2Y12 receptor, to which I also contributed directly). I would also mention “Rapid throughput concentration-response analysis of human taste discrimination,” which was published in JPET and introduces and validates the technology that I invented for taste testing, and shows that human taste can be pharmacologically characterized.
Among the most important papers ever to have been published in the field of pharmacology, and one that every student of pharmacology should be intimate with, is “Dissociation constants and relative efficacies of agonists acting on alpha adrenergic receptors in rabbit aorta,” which was published in JPET in 1976 by Besse and Furchgott. And I’d also mention “Clocinnamox distinguishes opioid agonists according to relative efficacy in normal and morphine-treated rats trained to discriminate morphine,” given that it has contributed significantly to my thinking on what to expect of behavioral manifestation of receptor function, and has had an influence on the development of the methods and technology I have invented for studying taste.
Sybertz: Publishing in the ASPET journals was always important to me. When I moved from Schering-Plough, which was a very traditional type of pharmaceutical company, into biotechnology, I moved a little bit away from the basics of pharmacology and didn’t publish in the journals during that period. But during the Schering Plough years, every time we came up with an important new drug, or had the opportunity from the company, The Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics was the go-to journal. Anytime we came up with some new compound that had some interesting pharmacology to it, we tried to go to ASPET first.
What do you consider to be the most significant shift in the study of pharmacology during your time in the field?
Gnegy: Pharmacology has always been able to ‘shift.’ It’s a catch-all for many other disciplines, from biochemistry to physiology to molecular genetics, cell biology and even bioinformatics. Pharmacology has always been devoted to drug action and drug receptors and thus has strong clinical ties. But pharmacologists are notably adaptive and will embrace many different fields and techniques to answer their critical questions. I am a neuropharmacologist. While I began my career thinking more like a biochemist (I have my PhD in biochemistry), my professorship in a pharmacology department shifted my research in more pharmacology directions.
ASPET played a role in that as well.
I grew closer to behavioral pharmacologists, many of whom I would meet at ASPET meetings. In addition, the neuropharmacology group at ASPET got stronger over time. For a while, it was dominated by the Society for Neuroscience but, to me, neuropharmacology had a welcome home in ASPET. ASPET served as a great focus for the neuropharmacologists.
Palmer: I’ve seen a tendency to drift away from the basic principles of pharmacology, and this is causing a lot of tension in the field. People are dazzled by the development of a lot of these new technologies, new instrumentation, new techniques and methods. And they’re getting wrapped up in the technology itself, and perhaps leaving the principles behind. This is leading to overreach in what you can conclude from your data. You have to do the pharmacology regardless of the methodology.
As pharmacologists, we have to make sure that when somebody is doing some kind of investigation, looking at how chemicals will affect physiology, those principles are not lost.
Sybertz: I think the introduction of the tools of molecular and cellular biology represented a very important shift in the study, allowed for improvements in identifying drug targets and mechanisms of action, and development of better approaches to drug discovery. ASPET adapted in parallel to the field. Their journals and their meetings highlighted new research, and I picked up on those developments through the society.
What do you see as the biggest challenges for pharmacologists in the next few years, and how do you think ASPET can help navigate those challenges?
Gnegy: There are a number of challenges for pharmacologists coming up, but the most important one is to continue to define pharmacology as a field. More and more universities are dispensing with pharmacology departments and rolling the pharmacologists into physiology or biochemistry departments. Moreover, many scientists in existing pharmacology departments are not trained pharmacologists. In itself, this is fine; I was not trained as a pharmacologist, but to keep the field alive, they need to embrace and teach pharmacology.
Pharmacology is a victim of its own success.
Scientists from every field think they can toss a drug into an experiment and get a relevant answer. But it’s the pharmacologists who can think about these experiments correctly.
Palmer: If you look at the history of pharmacology, it is the study of how chemicals interact with receptors to change physiological function. That’s what it always has been about, right from the very beginning. Now, it has a very, very successful application. Everybody knows this is how you discover new therapeutics. But that’s actually not what pharmacology is. And that’s why, you know, John Jacob Abel called it The Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics. He saw it that way, that there was pharmacology, and then there are therapeutics, and pharmacology will help you discover therapeutics.
Nowadays, it’s presented that pharmacology is just drug discovery. And it is not. That’s the most successful application, and everybody should be proud that we have that value to our science. The reason I see this as a problem is because medical schools, where pharmacology departments reside, are beginning to view pharmacology as an applied science and just a part of medicine. Pharmacology departments are beginning to sort of disappear. That’s a real problem, and I believe it’s because we’re too tightly associated with therapeutics.
I don’t mean to say that we should walk away from that. What I’m arguing is that, yes, we’ll keep that and try to promote it and try to build on it—but there are other areas where pharmacology plays a potentially critical role that we’re overlooking.
Sybertz: This affects everybody, but academia is facing the obvious retrenchment of government support for research. Which is just so, so terrible. In the industry arena, we’re facing the same challenge we always have—that the drugs that we work on and pursue and invest so much in terms of dollars and time add value to the healthcare system. And that’s just very challenging to do, and so many good therapies fail because it’s hard to do the clinical study to show that it really works.
As government support for technical research wanes, public-private partnerships are a tool that could help bridge that gap. We had a couple of public-private partnerships at Genzyme with the Harvard School of Public Health, the Broad Institute, and Medicines for Malaria Ventures, to support the study of infectious diseases in the Third World that were untreated at the time.
“Scientists from every field think they can toss a drug into an experiment and get a relevant answer. But it’s the pharmacologists who can think about these experiments correctly.” – Dr. Margaret Gnegy, PhD
What advice would you give an early career scientist who has recently joined ASPET?
Sybertz: Be flexible. Be prepared to make changes and don’t get stuck in one particular avenue.
The stories I hear coming out of NIH now, with some of the funding cuts that went on, are just tragic. People spent their whole lives looking at one particularly isolated area of research, and are now finding that research ended. What do they do after a twenty-year career? No one would have anticipated being in that situation, but you have to adapt. You have to make sure that you don’t find yourself in a place where you can’t adapt. Stay connected, not only within your immediate field, but more broadly. Be entrepreneurial. Make sure that you have a way to advance and promote your work beyond the scientific aspect.
I think that spirit is present in successful scientists.
Gnegy: Get involved. It is very enjoyable to be a member of ASPET committees and to get to know your colleagues better. You can establish important scientific and social connections. It makes you stronger within your discipline. I was proud to serve ASPET in various capacities, including being President of ASPET. It was very rewarding.
Pharmacology is a wonderful discipline. Devote yourself to it.
Palmer: This answer is different now than what I would have said even a year ago. I think the advice I’d give now is just hang tight. You know, at this last MAPS meeting, the Koelle Award was given to Scott Rawls at Temple University, and one of the things he said that struck a chord was, “If you love what you’re doing, just stick with it.” And anybody who’s in science, particularly at an early stage, went into it because they find it fascinating. And they’re going to be faced with a lot of obstacles right now. But sooner or later, things will clear. We will return to some sense of normalcy. It might take a little while, but science is crucial.
You can’t just give up on science. And the people who are kind of anti-science right now will go away, because you can’t go forward without good science. Right now, the job market is horrible. Right now, there’s loud anti-science sentiment. But they are a minority and eventually they’re going to fail.
Science will prevail.
