Ostrom Biography

Dr. Ostrom joined CUSP in 2016 as a Professor of Pharmacology.  Dr. Ostrom graduated with a B.A. in Biology from Dartmouth College in 1990.  He then worked in neuropharmacology at the University of Southern California School of Pharmacy and behavioral pharmacology for a start-up pharmaceutical company before entering graduate school.  Dr. Ostrom earned a Ph.D. in Pharmacology from the University of California, Irvine in 1998 and has held faculty positions at the University of California, San Diego and the University of Tennessee medical schools.  

As a graduate student, Dr. Ostrom studied muscarinic acetylcholine receptor signaling in airway and GI smooth muscle.  He was awarded a UC Regents dissertation fellowship and an award for outstanding graduate student.  Dr. Ostrom did postdoctoral training in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of California, San Diego.  Here, he turned his focus to molecular pharmacology and began to unravel some of the earliest observations of GPCR signaling compartments.  The American Heart Association named him a finalist for the prestigious Katz Award for outstanding young scientist.

Dr. Ostrom began his independent research career as an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in 2003.  That year he was awarded an R01 from NHLBI to study cAMP signaling in cardiac fibroblasts.  In 2005 Dr. Ostrom was awarded an American Heart Association grant-in-aid to characterize the molecular determinants of adenylyl cyclase localization.  In 2006 he was awarded another R01 from NHLBI to study cAMP signaling in airway and GI smooth muscle. Rising to Associate Professor in 2009, Dr. Ostrom began to shift toward dissecting the molecular details of cAMP signaling compartmentation.   In 2014 he was funded again by the American Heart Association for a phosphoproteomic study of cAMP signaling and in 2015 received an R01 to study human airway smooth muscle cAMP compartments from NIGMS.

Dr. Ostrom is an internationally recognized expert in adenylyl cyclases and cAMP signaling.  He has published over 70 peer-reviewed publications, review articles and book chapters as well as over 70 meeting abstracts.  He is Associate Editor for Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’s Archives of Pharmacology, the oldest pharmacology journal in existence.  He currently serves on the editorial boards for the American Journal of Physiology, Cell Physiology, Molecular Pharmacology and the British Journal of Pharmacology.