Spouse Joan Barenburg Children 2 | Name Michael Kuhar | |
Born March 10, 1944
Scranton, Pennsylvania ( 1944-03-10 ) Known for Candler Professor of Neuropharmacology at The Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University Alma mater Johns Hopkins University, Yale University | ||
Art and ethics of being a good colleague michael j kuhar dale carnegie
Michael J Kuhar (born 1944), a neuroscientist, professor, and author, is currently Candler Professor of Neuropharmacology at The Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University. Kuhar is also a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar, and a Senior Fellow in the Center for Ethics at Emory. He was previously Professor at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Branch Chief at the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Contents
- Art and ethics of being a good colleague michael j kuhar dale carnegie
- Biography
- Academic career
- Recognition
- References
Over his career, he has made discoveries in studies of drugs and the brain for, which he has received a number of awards. He has many publications as well. He has contributed as consultant to the government and industry, and as expert witness in forensic cases.
Biography
Kuhar was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania on March 10, 1944 and attended local schools. He obtained his BS degree in Physics and Philosophy from the University of Scranton in 1965. After spending a year at Harvard University in Applied Physics, he transferred to the Johns Hopkins University to study biophysics and pharmacology. He obtained his PhD in 1970, and did a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale in the Department of Psychiatry. His focus was on how the brain works and on the mechanism of action of therapeutic drugs that are used to treat psychiatric illness. He then took a faculty position in the Department of Pharmacology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1972, becoming Professor in 1981. In 1969, he married Joan Barenburg (1945-2008) and has two children. According to his university, Emory, he has more literary citations than any other Emory scientist and he is often an expert witness in both patent and medical malpractice legal cases.
Academic career
The focus of Kuhar’s research has been on how the brain works by using chemical signaling (neurotransmission) and how drugs act in the brain. Early in his career at Johns Hopkins, he studied the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which is important for the treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. He showed that the synthesis of acetylcholine was controlled by transpporting substances into the nerve cell. He developed microscopic methods which are in current widespread use to identify and locate drug receptors in the brain. These involved autoradiography at first and then PET scanning later, including the first PET scans of receptors in the human brain.
He then moved to the National Institute on drug Abuse (NIDA) in 1985 as head of the new Neuroscience Branch. His laboratory identified the molecular site in the brain responsible for the addicting properties of cocaine. This work explained the basic action of cocaine in the brain and suggested a target for developing medications for cocaine users. After ten years at NIDA, Kuhar moved to the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University as head of the Neuroscience Division, and as Candler Professor of Neuropharmacology. Much of his work there focused on cocaine and on CART peptides. The peptides at least partly regulate the actions of cocaine in the brain as well as feeding and body weight. Other areas of research and publications include developing medications for cocaine addicts, studying the effects of early life stress on drug use in adulthood, and ethics.
Recognition
Kuhar has been the President of College on Problems of drug Dependence as well as the International Drug Abuse Research society. Recognition he has received includes the 1984 Efron Award for outstanding basic research contributions by a young research scientist, the 1992 Otto Krayer Award for outstanding research by the American Society Of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, and the 2011 Nathan B Eddy Award for lifetime achievement from the College on Problems of Drug Dependence.