WSU President Irvin D. Reid recently announced that Bonnie Sloane, Ph.D., and Charles R. Schuster, Ph.D., are among the seven WSU faculty members selected to be distinguished professors. Dr. Sloane is professor and chair of the WSU Department of Pharmacology, and Dr. Schuster is a professor of psychiatry & behavioral neurosciences.
"The Distinguished Professor appointment denotes the highest of academic achievements, and each of the individuals chosen is recognized as an academic leader in his or her chosen field," President Reid wrote in a letter announcing the appointments.
With this year's appointments, the university now has honored 27 faculty members with this title.
Dr. Sloane joined the WSU School of Medicine in 1980 and has built a distinguished career during her 25 years at the university. Her research grant support includes four current grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense.
She is an inaugural Host Awardee of the Avon Foundation/American Association for Cancer Research International Scholar in Breast Cancer Research, a national competition awarded to only four people in 2004. Dr. Sloane has published 112 peer-reviewed articles, and has served on national planning committees, including the National Cancer Institute Think Tank on Inflammation and Cancer.
After joining the WSU School of Medicine in 1995, Dr. Schuster became the founding director of the Substance Abuse Research Division and the director of the Addiction Research Institute. Formerly, Dr. Schuster served as the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and accompanied the U.S. attorney general on presidential trips to Asia and Europe to curtail drug abuse and illegal smuggling of opiates.
Dr. Schuster has received a number of NIDA/NIH grants, including one to establish the Great Lakes Regional Node of the NIDA Clinical Trials Network. This program seeks to determine efficacy of treatment interventions.
He is a mentor for the Robert Wood Johnson Project for Leadership Development in the area of substance abuse and is a founding member of the International Network for Drug Policy Analysis. Dr. Schuster is co-author of three books, 19 journal articles, including American Journal on Addications, Drug and Alcohol Dependence and the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs.