James O. Schenk

Professor

Address

Troy 115
Pullman, WA 99164-4630

(509) 335-7517
email: geni@wsu.edu

Education

Research

Professor Schenk completed his undergraduate work at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, studied clinical chemistry at Georgia State University, and received his Ph.D. in analytical chemistry and neuroscience under Dr. Ralph N. Adams at the University of Kansas. He subsequently spent one year as a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral research training fellow and two additional years as a National Institute of Mental Health postdoctoral research fellow in the laboratory of B.S. Bunney in the Neuropsycho- pharmacology Research Unit at Yale University School of Medicine. He remained at Yale for an additional year as a postdoctoral associate before joining the faculty here at WSU in the summer of 1986. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1991, Professor in 1996, and in 1997 he was named an Edward R. Meyer Distinguished Professor.

The work in our laboratory focuses on the development of micro electroanalytical techniques for application to problems in neurobiology, neuropharmacology, and biological psychiatry. The work involves the construction and characterization of chemical microsensors for use in monitoring the biogenic amine neurotransmitters, as well as neurobiologically important inorganic ions. Our work is rather diverse in that we conduct basic electrochemical studies with these small sensors, as well as explore their usefulness for neuropharmacological and neurophysiological studies in vivo.

Problems of current interest include minaturization of chemical sensors to dimensions of less than one micrometer, the development of electrochemical/neurobiological metabolic models for interpreting chemical measurements in vivo, the correlation of in vivo chemical signals with measures of brain cell electrical activity, chemical measurements of subsecond components of neurotransmitter release, the determination of the spatial and temporal constraints of extracellular neurotransmitter influences at the level of the nerve cell, mechanism of membrane transporters for catecholamines, and the chemistry and mechanism of action of antipsychotic drugs.

Publications