### Research Interests
Investigating the long-term central nervous system changes (prenatal and postnatal) produced by drugs of abuse. Fetal dopamine neuron development. Parkinson's disease etiology and experimental therapeutics.
Jack W. Lipton received his undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988 in Psychology. He went on to earn his Ph.D. in Behavioral Neuroscience at UCLA in 1993 with Dr. Michael J. Fanselow. After finishing a postdoctoral fellowship at Rush Children's Hospital in Chicago, Dr. Lipton was offered an assistant professorship at Rush University Medical Center (RUMC) in the Department of Pharmacology in 1996 where he established a research program examining the consequences of fetal exposure to cocaine and ecstasy on the developing brain. He achieved tenure and a promotion to Associate Professor of Neurological Sciences in 2002. In 2004, Dr. Lipton and a team of his colleagues from RUMC were recruited to the University of Cincinnati (UC) where he was promoted to full professor and became the Director of the Division of Neuropharmacology in the Department of Psychiatry.
Dr. Lipton and his colleagues Drs. Timothy Collier, Caryl Sortwell and Kathy Steece-Collier recently relocated their PD research team to MSU from UC. Dr. Lipton joined the MSU College of Human Medicine in July of 2009 and is currently the Chair of Translational Science and Molecular Medicine at the Grand Rapids Campus. The UC PD research team plans to transfer their newly acquired Morris K. Udall Center of Excellence in Parkinson's Disease to MSU as of July 2010. Dr. Lipton has been continuously funded by the NIH since 1993 and is currently receives funding from several federal awards from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute on Neurological Disorders and Stroke and the Michael J. Fox Foundation. He is the author of over 50 papers and book chapters on the pharmacology and toxicology of drugs of abuse and the neurobiology of Parkinson's disease. (In his spare time, he can often be found tinkering on old motorcycles in his backyard.)
