Lonnie P. Wollmuth

Biography

Lonnie Wollmuth attended Portland State University and received a B.A. degree in 1983 and an M.S. degree in 1988. In 1992 he earned a Ph.D. in Physiology and Biophysics from the University of Washington, Seattle working under Dr. Bertil Hille. From 1993 to 1998, Dr. Wollmuth was a Senior Fellow in the Division of Cell Physiology at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research working with Professor Dr. Bert Sakmann and was a Human Frontier Science Program Fellow from 1993-1995 and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow from 1996-1997. In 1998, Dr. Wollmuth joined the faculty in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at the State University of New York at Stony Brook as an Assistant Professor. In 1999-2002 he received an Alexandrine and Alexander Sinsheimer Scholars Award. He was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2003 and Full Professor in 2009. He has served as Director of the Graduate Program in Neuroscience at Stony Brook since 2006. Professor Wollmuth is a member of the Center for Nervous System Disorders at Stony Brook University and is a member of the Society for Neuroscience and the Biophysical Society.

Research Interest

The Wollmuth laboratory maintains a close scientific interaction with Dr. Helen Hsieh, a pediatric surgeon at SB Children’s Hospital. Synapses are specialized structures that control the flow of information between cells in the brain. Research in our laboratory addresses fundamental mechanisms underlying fast synaptic transmission in the brain, focusing on those synapses that use glutamate or GABA as a neurotransmitter. Since glutamate and GABA are the major excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters, respectively, in the human brain, synapses that use these neurotransmitters are fundamental to all brain functions, and are associated with, when dysfunctional, numerous brain disorders including epilepsy, autism, stroke, and Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease among many others. Our laboratory studies numerous issues related to these neurotransmitter systems. We study mechanisms of how ionotropic glutamate receptors convert glutamate into ion channel opening and how ions pass through the open channel. We are interested in how disease-associated mutations and antibodies lead to neurological disorders. We study the role of GABAergic signaling in circuit development, focusing both on the input to GABAergic interneurons and their output. Since we want to understand the details, our approach is molecular and cellular in orientation and highly quantitative.