PERSON: Namandjé Bumpus


Employer

Position

Chief Scientist
Biography

Namandjé N. Bumpus is an American pharmacologist and the Chief Scientist of the Food and Drug Administration. She was previously director of the department of pharmacology and molecular sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she holds the E.K. Marshall and Thomas H. Maren professorship in pharmacology. Bumpus is known for her research on the metabolism of antiviral drugs used to treat HIV-1 and how genetic variations in drug-processing enzymes may impact these drugs’ efficacy. Bumpus received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2016.

Namandjé Bumpus was born in Philadelphia and raised in western Massachusetts. She became interested in chemistry at a young age, even writing to the American Chemical Society while still in elementary school to ask about the kind of careers chemists can have.

She earned a B.A. in Biology from Occidental College, in Los Angeles, California, in 2003. At Occidental, she was introduced to research experiences in ecology, then she ventured into pharmacology through Charles Ross Summer Research Fellowship at the University of Michigan, during which she was mentored by Dr. Richard R. Neubig. She enjoyed the experience so much that she decided to return to the University of Michigan after graduating from Occidental College in order to pursue a PhD in pharmacology.

She earned her Ph.D. in pharmacology from the University of Michigan Medical School in 2007. Her thesis research, and much of her later work, examined how drugs are processed by cytochrome P450 enzymes, (CYPs) a family of heme-containing monooxygenases, that often help make drugs more soluble, aiding with drug clearance. Bumpus performed her thesis research in the laboratory of Dr. Paul F. Hollenberg, investigating how a naturally occurring mutation in CYP2B6 affects its ability to be inactivated by compounds known the inactivate the wild-type CYP2B6. She also looked into how naturally-occurring variants could impact how patients cleared the antidepressant Bupropion, and the antiviral Efavirenz.

After graduating, she accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, where she worked under the guidance of Dr. Eric F. Johnson to study the regulation of CYP4A and CYP4F genes in mice. She studied what cellular pathways regulated fatty acid metabolism and how stress pathways influence the CYPs that metabolize lipids.

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