Candace Pert
American neuroscientist (1946-2013)
Candace Beebe Pert (June 26, 1946 – September 12, 2013) was an American neuroscientist and pharmacologist who discovered the opioid receptor, the cellular binding site for endorphins in the brain.
Early life and education
She was born on June 26, 1946, in Manhattan, New York City.
She completed her undergraduate studies in biology, cum laude in 1970 from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.
Academic career
In 1974, Candace Pert earned a Ph.D. in pharmacology from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she worked in the laboratory of Solomon Snyder and discovered the brain's opiate receptor.
Pert conducted a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellowship with the Department of Pharmacology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine from 1974 to 1975. She conducted research at the National Institute of Mental Health from 1975 to 1987.
In 1983, she became the Chief of the Section on Brain Biochemistry of the Clinical Neuroscience Branch, the only female chief at NIMH.
She left to found and direct a private biotech laboratory in 1987.
Pert was a research professor in the department of physiology and biophysics at Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C.
In her latter years, she was with RAPID Pharmaceuticals.
In 1997 she published her book Molecules of Emotion.
She appeared as one of the experts in Bill Moyers 1993 PBS video production, "Healing and the Mind", and in the 2004 film What the #$*!
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This entry incorporates text from “Candace Pert” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.