Most alumni are familiar with Ron Burnette, professor in the Pharmaceutical Sciences Division, through his teaching. He's won the outstanding teacher award from the first-year classes a dozen times, and they may encounter him years after graduation as he does a large amount of extension teaching on pharmacokinetics to people in the pharmaceutical industry.
On the research side, Burnette is, of course, interested in pharmacokinetics.
"I'm interested in how drugs are absorbed, distributed and eliminated from the body,'' he says. This approach has led to translational research with imaging experts in the School of Medicine and Public Health, where he is working with Jamey Weichert, associate professor of radiology, and Robert Jeraj, associate professor of medical physics and human oncology, to use imaging agents to deliver cancer drugs to tumors.
Another long-standing research effort is combining experimental data with computational chemistry to better understand how drugs interact with the body at a molecular level. His research has focused on ion transport across cell membranes and how one can design drugs to take advantage of that system.
"We're trying to come up with a rational way to design drugs that can access those systems,'' he says. "The goal is a more efficient way to generate promising drug candidates."
Burnette has been a leader in the Complex Systems Group, a UW-Madison organization that brings together scientists from areas as diverse as social sciences, linguistics and physics who are interested in understanding complex systems. "For me, the complex system is the human body,'' he says. "There's a continuum of trying to understand drug interactions from the molecular level up through the system level of the entire body.''
Burnette took over July 1 as chair of the Pharmaceutical Sciences Division, and he also will continue as associate dean for faculty affairs. He has been a member of the Wisconsin faculty since 1982, after earning electrical engineering degrees from the University of California-Irvine and Stanford University, and Pharm.D. (1979) and PhD (1982) degrees in pharmaceutical chemistry from the University of California-San Francisco.
