The Department of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology comprises 24 primary faculty, 75 graduate students and 36 postdoctoral fellows with complementary research interests and expertise. Ongoing research in the department addresses a myriad of important scientific questions relevant to cancer, metabolism, nervous system function, drugs of abuse, and environmental toxicants. One unifying theme is the use of pharmacological approaches to define the key regulatory steps in relevant pathways that may be amenable to pharmaceutical exploitation or whose dysregulation may be involved in the pathogenesis of disease.