Dr. Stephen Traynelis
Dr. Stephen Traynelis is a Professor of Pharmacology and Chemical Biology at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, GA, and Director of the Center for Functional Evaluation of Rare Variants. His work embodies three goals: (i) to understand ion channel function in neurological disease, (ii) to use medicinal chemistry to develop a new generation of allosteric modulators of glutamate receptors as both tools and new therapeutics, and (iii) to exploit the tremendous advances in genetics and personalized medicine to improve treatment of neurological disease.
Dr. Traynelis has provided an in depth understanding of glutamate receptor function, and developed multiple first-in-class series of subtype-selective NMDA receptor allosteric modulators that possess therapeutic potential for the treatment of ischemic brain injury, schizophrenia, Parkinson’s Disease, epilepsy and other disorders. This led to the founding of NeurOp Inc and the development of neuroprotective agents, one of which is currently being evaluated in clinical trials. Dr. Traynelis’ work to understand the functional consequences of genetic variation in glutamate receptor genes in healthy individuals and neurological patients have provided new insights into receptor function and genetic risk. These efforts led to the founding of a new Center at Emory that bridges the gap between genetic information on receptor variants and their functional and pharmacological consequences, laying the groundwork for precision medicine and the evaluation of novel treatment paradigms.
Dr. Traynelis received a BS from West Virginia University in Chemistry (1984, summa cum laude) and a Ph.D. in Pharmacology from the University of North Carolina (1988). He completed postdoctoral fellowships at University College London and the Salk Institute, and joined the faculty at Emory in 1994. Dr. Traynelis is a John Merck Scholar, an AAAS Fellow, former editor-in-chief of Molecular Pharmacology, as well as recipient of an NIH Javits Award, a R35 Research Program Award, and the Hodgkin-Huxley-Katz Prize. He is a co-author on over 200 peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, invited commentaries, a co-inventor on 5 US patents, and has developed several widely used software packages. He has given 165 invited lectures.