Emily Warner receives prestigious ASPET Summer Fellowship

Emily Warner, a junior Neuroscience major, received an American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET) Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow (SURF) award for 2015. The ASPET SURF is a very competitive award intended to introduce undergraduate students to research in pharmacology, with the goal of developing student interest in pursuing a career in science.

The award will provide a summer stipend to Warner, a research assistant and lab manager in the behavioral pharmacology laboratory of Glenn Stevenson, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Psychology, with whom she has been working since her freshman year.

Warner has been involved in several drug evaluation and methods development studies and is currently working on developing behavioral assays to characterize pain/motivation interactions. These interactions may be one way to assess affective dimensions of pain-- a critically important area of current research. Once validated, these assays will provide a means to screen novel compounds for the treatment of pain. Warner’s studies are funded by a grant awarded to Stevenson from the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases/National Institutes of Health (NIAMS/NIH).

Stevenson will provide an in-kind match to the stipend that Warner will receive through the ASPET SURF award in order to fund her work in his laboratory this summer.

In addition to her full-time work in the lab, Warner is also a member of the Neuroscience Club, a member and vice president of PSI CHI (the international honor society in psychology) and a peer tutor at the Student Academic Success Center (SASC). She has also been on the dean’s list every semester since joining UNE.