John P. Harrelson, PhD

Educational History

PhD, Medicinal Chemistry--University of Washington
BS, Chemistry--Gonzaga University

Practice/Research Interests

My overall focus is to contribute to scientific discovery and the effective use of medicines through collaborative science, teaching, mentoring, and active membership in the research community. We strive to discover mechanistic details that contribute to variability in drug response to identify new therapeutic targets for drug discovery, and to utilize current medications more effectively. Major areas of active research include drug metabolism, nicotine addiction, drug-drug/drug-herb interactions, bioanalytical methods (LC-MS/MS), inhibitor design, mechanistic enzymology, pharmacogenomics, in vitro-in vivo extrapolation, structure-toxicity relationships, and the modulation of letrozole metabolism (letrozole is a breast cancer drug).

A list of publications can be found on Dr. Harrelson's NCBI bibliography.

For more information, please review Dr. Harrelson's CV.

Outside the Classroom

I'm fortunate to be a husband, and the father of three kids, and thus have a very full family life. It's wonderful to live in the Pacific Northwest, but I also like to travel when we can. I enjoy a wide variety of sports (e.g., basketball, baseball, running, and etc.), music, and movies. Early in my career I was a chemical officer in the US Army, and worked as a synthetic chemist at Molecular Probes, in Eugene, Oregon. Early in my academic career I also had the opportunity to work at Eli Lilly as a Visiting Academic Scientist, which was a great learning experience.