2006 P.B. Dews Awardee - Dr. Leonard Cook

Leonard Cook, Ph.D., is Recipient of the 2006 P.B. Dews Lifetime Achievement Award in Behavioral Pharmacology.

Dr. Leonard Cook, retired from the DuPont Merck Pharmaceutical Company, is the winner of the 2006 P.B. Dews Lifetime Achievement Award in Behavioral Pharmacology. The award is given every other year and honors the fundamental contributions of P.B. Dews to behavioral pharmacology. Dr. Cook is internationally recognized as one of the foremost pioneers in behavioral pharmacology. He has contributed substantially to the discovery and evaluation of psychotherapeutics, and to the career development of behavioral pharmacologists, who in their turn have been leaders in the field. Dr. Cook has established drug behavioral interactions that are presently taught as classical principles in this field.

Dr. Cook earned his Ph.D. from Yale University School of Medicine and subsequently joined Smith Kline & French Laboratories where he played a dominant role in the discovery of the first drugs for schizophrenia as well as in the early development of their Department of Pharmacology. Dr. Cook later joined Hoffmann-LaRoche where he was appointed Director of Pharmacology and led research in the identification of drugs for treating anxiety. In 1983 he joined DuPont de Nemours as director of their CNS research and expanded their CNS research program to focus on Alzheimer's disease therapy. Throughout his career, Dr. Cook has set the standard for CNS drug discovery programs in industry.

Dr. Cook has held academic posts as adjunct professor of pharmacology at Temple Medical School and in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. He was also visiting professor of pharmacology at Bejing and Shanghai Medical Schools.

Dr. Cook was presented the 2006 P.B. Dews Lifetime Achievement Award in Behavioral Pharmacology on Saturday, April 1 at 7:00 p.m. at the Awards Ceremony of the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics/Experimental Biology (EB) 2006 Meeting in San Francisco, California. The Awards Ceremony was held at the Moscone Convention Center, West Building, Room 2002.

His lecture was titled “Reflections on my career in psychopharmacology“ and was published in The Pharmacologist .