Bryan L. Roth MD, PhD is the Michael Hooker Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill School of Medicine. He also leads the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the US Department of Defense, to discover and develop novel medicines.
Dr. Roth received his MD and PhD (Biochemistry) from St. Louis University in 1983 and subsequently trained in pharmacology (NIH), molecular biology (Stanford) and Psychiatry (Stanford). Prior to coming to UNC, Dr. Roth was a Professor of Psychiatry and Biochemistry at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine where his clinical specialty was treatment-resistant schizophrenia.
Dr. Roth has published nearly 500 papers in the general areas of molecular pharmacology, structural biology and synthetic biology including 28 papers published in Science, Nature and Cell over the past decade. Scientific highlights include creation of the widely used chemogenetic platform dubbed ‘DREADDs’ and the elucidation of the structures of LSD and antipsychotic drugs to their molecular targets.
Dr. Roth was elected to the National Academy of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019. He has received many honors including the Goodman and Gilman Award for Receptor Pharmacology, the PhRMA Foundation Excellence in Pharmacology Award, a NARSAD Distinguished Investigator Award and the IUPHAR Analytical Pharmacology Lectureship. Dr. Roth also given more than 40 named lectures including the 2017 Martin Rodbell Lecture and a Presidential Special Lecturer at the 2018 Society for Neurosciences meeting.