Mark Wightman was named the W R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1989, and is a faculty member in the Neurobiology Curriculum. He received a B.A. Degree with honors from Erskine College, Due West, South Carolina in 1968, and the Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry from the University of North Carolina in 1974. After postdoctoral training at the University of Kansas with Ralph Adams, he joined the faculty in the Department of Chemistry at Indiana University where he remained before coming to the University of North Carolina in 1989.
Dr. Wightman was the recipient of an NIH Research Career Development Award (1979-83), an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (1981-83), and a Jacob Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award, NIH (1989-95). He received the Chemical Instrumentation Award from the American Chemical Society's Analytical Division in August 1994, and the David Grahame Award from the Electrochemical Society's Physical Division in 1995. He will receive the Reilley Award from the Society for Electroanalytical Chemistry in 1996. He has given numerous invited talks and served as Chair of the Gordon Research Conference on Electrochemistry (1992). He is on the editorial board of Biosensors & Bioelectronics (1988-present) and served on the Instrumentation Advisory Panel for Analytical Chemistry (1988-1990). He has authored more than 170 scientific publications in the areas of dopamine neurotransmission, single cell chemical analysis and electrochemistry.
The Wightman Lab focuses on the use of electrochemical microelectrode techniques for (1) the measurement of chemical messengers released from cells in tissue or from individual cells in culture, including dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine, and serotonin, and (2) the measurement of brain tissue metabolic substances such as oxygen, ascorbate, and uric acid. The lab employs in vivo voltammetry to measure the real-time kinetics of dopamine release and uptake during stimulation of ascending axons in freely moving animals. The lab also investigates brain slice preparation for the measurement of dopamine uptake and release, and the effects of pharmacological agents on these processes. Two interesting approaches utilized recently are selective electrode techniques that measure brain extracellular calcium and pH as well as quantal release of catecholamines at individual cells. These techniques are used to characterize the kinetics of catecholamine and serotonin uptake and release in select regions of the rat brain, and to relate the dynamic concentration of dopamine, observed in extracellular brain fluid, to synaptic and extrasynaptic conununication by this neurotransmitter. Ultimately, the lab seeks to understand the regulation of monoamine release and cellular uptake, and their effects on the lifetime of these chemical messengers in the extracellular fluid of the rat brain. Over the long-term, the lab aims to advance towards novel chemical in vivo methods that can rapidly evaluate the action of new pharmacological agents on dopaminergic transmission. Such methods are powerful ways to understand the effects of chronic treatment of specific agonists and antagonists on monoamine release and uptake.
Dr. Wightman's
Publications
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