Once a budding neuroanatomist, Joyce DeLeo made her mark by harnessing her interests in psychiatry and biology to search for novel pain treatments. As chair of Dartmouth Medical School's pharmacology and toxicology department, she now plans to use the same integrative approach to make progress in the department. See CV

After a BS in biology and chemistry from the State University of New York in Albany, DeLeo was torn between graduate school and medical school. The independence she was given as a research assistant at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, helped her make up her mind.

DeLeo's dissertation, at the University of Oklahoma, focused on neuropharmacology related to stroke, and resulted in a patent for a drug to treat chronic pain. As the university's first Fulbright scholar, she next studied the electrophysiology of ischaemia at the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Martinsried, Germany. The fellowship proved career-defining, as she studied the role of glial cells (the central nervous system's maintenance and support cells) in ischaemic stroke, under the leader of the field, departmental head Georg Kreutzberg.

A postdoc at Dartmouth Medical School's department of anaesthesiology began what has become a 20-year career so far. “Staying in one place doesn't limit you any more, technologically or collaboratively,” she says. In fact, she says, it has afforded high-profile leadership opportunities.

DeLeo says she made her greatest progress once she began to read outside the pain field's specialist journals. She incorporated findings on the adaptive and innate immune systems into her search for novel agents to suppress the glial changes that produce chronic pain.

“Early on, Joyce was at the front of the pack, determining how the immune system might influence sensory perception and signalling in the spinal cord,” says Michael Vasko, chair of the department of pharmacology and toxicology at Purdue University in Indianapolis, Indiana. He says DeLeo is up to the challenges of her new position, notably balancing basic versus translational research and bringing in funds.

“We want to find creative ways to fund our research, such as exploring new ways to partner with industry through patenting and licensing opportunities,” DeLeo says. She plans to continue her pursuit of novel targets to treat and prevent pain by modulating glial function.

“It's important for chairs to lead by example — and she does that well in all areas,” says Vasko.