Dr. Ron is a graduate of the School of Pharmacy at the Hebrew University Jerusalem, Israel. She obtained her Ph.D. in Pharmacology from the Hebrew University Jerusalem. She then did her postdoctoral training at The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and Stanford University studying the role of scaffolding proteins in signal transduction under the mentorship of Prof. Daria Mochly-Rosen. She has been at the Ernest Gallo Research Center at UCSF for over ten years. 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, the Scientific Director for a P50 NIH-NIAAA Center Grant, and the Director of Intramural Programs at the Ernest Gallo Research Center. She is a recipient of three NIH RO1 grant awards and is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Neuroscience, Addiction Biology, and the Alcohol Journal, as well as a field editor for Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.
Dr. Ron’s research focuses on the molecular neurobiology of alcohol use disorders, for which her laboratory uses molecular, electrophysiological, and rodent behavior approaches. Dr. Ron’s areas of expertise are molecular neuroscience, signal transduction, neurobiology of addiction, and psychiatric disorders. She has published extensively in high-impact factor journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, the Journal of Neuroscience, FASEB Journal, Biological Psychiatry, the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and many others. Over the years, her group has made several major contributions to the field of addiction and identified novel targets that could potentially be developed as therapeutics to treat alcohol addiction. Several of her studies resulted in UCSF press releases that received the attention of both the scientific community and the general public.
Research
We use molecular biology, biochemistry, and electrophysiology, in parallel with behavioral models, to study how scaffolding proteins and kinases regulate neuronal function and gene expression. We also study how these normal processes are altered upon exposure to alcohol and drugs of abuse and how these changes lead to the development or the prevention of addiction.
Lab Members
Somayeh Ahmadiantehrani, Postdoctoral Fellow
Emmanuel Darcq, Postdoctoral Fellow
Hannah Gil, Intern
Sami Ben Hamida, Postdoctoral Fellow
Judy Lim, Research Student
Melissa Lin, Intern
Feng Liu, Postdoctoral Fellow
Ky Phamluong, Lab Manager
Jun Wang, Staff Research Investigator, Gallo Center; Adjunct Assistant Professor of Neurology, UCSF
Vincent Warnault, Postdoctoral Fellow
Su Wu, Postdoctoral Fellow
Ji Hwan Yu, Intern
Wendy Zhu, Staff Research Associate