William R. Sawyers, Chief Administrative Officer, Executive Vice President, and General Counsel

William Sawyers joined the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center as Executive Vice President, Chief Administrative Officer, and General Counsel in 2005. In this role, he oversees all non-scientific functions, including Finance & Accounting, Facilities, Administration, Grants and Contracts, Human Resources, and Intellectual Property. He also supervises the Center’s efforts to partner with industry and to commercialize Gallo Center technologies. Prior to joining the Gallo Center, Mr. Sawyers was a partner in the law firm of Orrick, Herrington, & Sutcliffe LLP in San Francisco, where he represented public, private, and not-for-profit companies in various matters, including mergers, financings, contracts, and corporate governance. Before moving to Orrick, Mr. Sawyers served as Vice President and General Counsel of Del Monte Foods Company, a NYSE company based in San Francisco. Mr. Sawyers received his BA, cum laude, from Williams College and his JD from the University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law.

Robert O. Messing, MD, Vice President of Internal Affairs, Chairman of the Executive Committee

Dr. Messing joined the Gallo Center as a Principal Investigator in 1986 and became Associate Director in 2000. In this role, he oversees several internal scientific functions at the Center. He also serves as a member of the Gallo Center Executive Committee, participates in overseeing the Gallo Preclinical Development Program, runs an active molecular and cell biology laboratory, and participates in the Human Clinical Research group at the center. Dr. Messing is a Professor of Neurology and member of the Graduate Program in Neurosciences at UCSF. He regularly attends on the neurology in-patient service and outpatient clinic at San Francisco General Hospital. He also serves as Associate Editor of the Annals of Neurology and President of the Research Society on Alcoholism. Dr. Messing has served on several advisory and grant review boards, including the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the Board of Directors of the Research Society on Alcoholism, the Medical Advisory Council for the Alcoholic Beverage Medical Research Foundation, and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Epilepsy Therapy Development Project. Dr. Messing received his BA in History in 1974, and his MD in 1979, both from Stanford University. He trained in Internal Medicine from 1979 to 1981 at the University of Virginia, and then in Neurology at UCSF from 1981-1984, where he served as Chief Resident from 1983 to 1984. He currently holds the UCSF Endowed Chair in Neurology in Honor of the Gallo Family.

Howard L. Fields, MD, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer

Howard Fields received his MD and PhD in Neuroscience at Stanford in 1965-66. He then spent three years as a research neurologist at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. Following clinical training in neurology at Harvard, he joined the faculty of the University of California San Francisco, where he is currently Professor of Neurology, director of the Wheeler Center for the Neurobiology of Addiction. He has made major contributions to understanding and treating pain and addiction. His group was the first to demonstrate the clinical effectiveness of opioids for neuropathic pain and of topical lidocaine for post-herpetic neuralgia. He discovered and elucidated a pain modulating neural circuit that is required for opioids to produce analgesia. He also discovered that placebo analgesia is blocked by an opioid antagonist.  He has discovered nerve cells in the ventral striatum that selectively encode the magnitude of a reward.  Fields has combined human and animal research and has published several human functional imaging studies on impulsivity, which is a major risk factor for substance abuse. He has over 300 scientific publications and has received numerous research awards. His honors include include a Merit Award from NIH, the Kerr Award of the American Pain Society, the Cotzias Award of the American Academy of Neurology and the R.D. Adams lecture of the American Neurological Association. He also gave the Beecher Lecture (in anesthesiology) and the Adams Lecture (in neurology) at Harvard. In 1997, he was elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine and in 2010 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dorit Ron, PhD, Director of Intramural Programs

Dr. Ron is a graduate of the School of Pharmacy at the Hebrew University Jerusalem, Israel. She obtained her PhD in Pharmacology from the Hebrew University Jerusalem. She then did her postdoctoral training at UCSF and Stanford studying the role of scaffolding proteins in signal transduction. She has been at the Gallo Research Center at UCSF for over 10 years. Her research focuses on molecular neuroscience and specifically on the molecular neurobiology of addiction. Dr. Ron is a Professor in the Department of Neurology at UCSF and a member of the Neuroscience Graduate Program. She is also the Endowed Chair in Cell Biology of Addiction in Neurology at UCSF and the Scientific Director for a P50 NIH-NIAAA center grant. She is a recipient of three NIH RO1 awards and is an associate editor for the Journal of Neuroscience, Addiction Biology, the Alcohol Journal, as well as a field editor for Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

Nancy Green, Director of Administration

Nancy Green joined the Gallo Center in 2006. As Director of Administration, she oversees the day-to-day operations of the Center’s administrative departments. Nancy has 15 years of experience in management in the legal and biotech industries. She is an active member of the Association of Legal Administrators.