Research in the Wollmuth lab continues to address molecular and biophysical mechanisms underlying fast synaptic transmission in the nervous system, focusing specifically on those synapses that use glutamate as a neurotransmitter.  The big news over the past year was the starting of a new RO1 entitled ‘Gating and permeation in ionotropic glutamate receptors’.  Johansen Amin and Kelvin Chan, MSTP students, joined the lab.  Undergraduates Matthew Alsaloum (Biochemistry) and Joel Thomas (Pharmacology) completed honors thesis in the Spring, 2015.  Matthew is presently in the M.D./Ph.D. program at Yale medical school.  Aaron Gochman, a new undergraduate in the lab, was awarded a URECA summer fellowship for the summer of 2015.  Graduate students/fellows in the lab presented posters at the Society for Neuroscience (Quan Gan, Catherine Salussolia) and Biophysical Society (Johansen Amin) meetings.  I gave invited seminars at the Hartman Center Symposium on Parkinson’s Research at Stony Brook, in the Dept. of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Columbia University, and at the Ion Channel meeting at the Telluride Research Center in Telluride, Colorado.