Dr. Lauren Aleksunes Receives the 2019 Richard Okita Early Career Award in Drug Metabolism

Apr 22, 2019 | News | 0 comments

Dr. Lauren Aleksunes Receives the 2019 Richard Okita Early Career Award in Drug Metabolism

 

2019 Award Winners

It is our honor to announce this distinguished group of 2019 Scientific Achievement Award winners who are being recognized for their excellence in the pharmacology field.

Richard Okita Early Career Award in Drug Metabolism and Disposition

Lauren M. Aleksunes, PharmD, PhD

The ASPET Division for Drug Metabolism and Disposition is pleased to award Dr. Lauren Aleksunes from Rutgers University the 2019 Richard Okita Early Career Award in Drug Metabolism and Disposition.  This award was established to recognize excellent original research by early career investigators in the area of drug metabolism and disposition.

Dr. Aleksunes is being recognized for her mechanistic and translational research on transporter biology, including the elucidation of critical roles of transporters in xenobiotic disposition and in the protection of multiple organs against chemical toxicities.

She received her PharmD and PhD degrees from the University of Connecticut and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Kansas Medical Center. She is currently an associate professor in the School of Pharmacy and the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute at Rutgers University where her research interests continue in the transport of toxicants in the placenta, kidneys, and brain.  She also serves as director of the Rutgers Toxicology Graduate Program. In 2010, Dr. Aleksunes was selected as an Outstanding New Environmental Scientist Awardee from NIH/NIEHS. She has been a member of ASPET since 2010 and currently serves on the Finance Committee.

The award will be presented and Dr. Aleksunes will give a lecture titled “Transporters as Gatekeepers of Toxicant Exposure” during the ASPET Annual Meeting at EB 2019 in Orlando, FL in the division’s platform session on Monday, April 8, 2019 from 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm.

Additionally the division is hosting a special meet-the-experts event and dinner to celebrate the recent naming of the early career award after Dr. Richard Okita on Tuesday, April 9, 2019 from 6:30 pm – 9:30 pm.