Newswise — Irwin B. Levitan, Ph.D., has been named Founding Chair of the newly created Department of Neuroscience at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University. He has also been appointed director of the Farber Institute for Neurosciences. His appointment is effective January 1, 2010.
“With his recruitment, Jefferson further strengthens its position as a center of undisputed excellence in basic, translational and clinical neuroscience research,” said Mark Tykocinski, M.D., dean, Jefferson Medical College. “I am delighted that he has agreed to take on this pivotal role.”
As chair of the Department of Neuroscience, Dr. Levitan will assemble a world-class group of neuroscientists to complement Jefferson’s established group of researchers in Neurology and Neurological Surgery. As director of the Farber Institute, he will further the institute's mission of research into the causes, prevention and treatment of neurological disorders and disease.
Prior to joining Jefferson, Dr. Levitan served as the David Mahoney Professor and Chair of the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Medicine. In addition, he was Director of Penn's campus-wide Mahoney Institute of Neurological Sciences.
Dr. Levitan received his undergraduate, Masters and Ph.D. degrees in Biochemistry from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. After postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, and the University of California at San Diego, he was a group leader at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel, Switzerland where he began investigations of the regulation of neuronal excitability in the marine mollusc Aplysia. He continued these studies after moving to the Department of Biochemistry at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts where he was Professor of Biochemistry and founding Director of the Volen Center for Complex Systems. While at Brandeis he began investigating the modulation of ion channel proteins, using a combination of molecular and biophysical approaches. More recently he has been pursuing the concept that ion channels do not function on their own in the plasma membrane, but rather exist and function as part of multi-protein signaling complexes.
Dr. Levitan is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including two successive National Institutes of Health Jacob Javits Neuroscience Investigator Awards; and two awards from the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and has played a number of prominent leadership roles in the 38,000-member Society for Neuroscience. He recently was elected President of the Association of American Medical School Neuroscience Department Chairs, a position he will assume in March 2010. He has been senior editor for Neuroscience for the Encyclopedia of Life Sciences, and a reviewing editor for the Journal of Neuroscience. In addition Dr. Levitan is co-editor of Ion Channels and Receptors, and Neuropharmacology: Potassium Channels. He is the co-author of Neuromodulation: The Biochemical Control of Neuronal Excitability, and also is co-author of a widely-used textbook, The Neuron: Cell and Molecular Biology.
Editor’s Note: Dr. Levitan resides in Philadelphia, PA.
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