New Professor Brings Addiction Research to College of Pharmacy
Valeria Lallai has traveled far to pursue her love of science. From a small village in Sardinia to California, and now to Columbia, she joins the USC College of Pharmacy as an assistant professor in the Department of Drug Discovery and Biomedical Sciences.
Lallai focuses on how drugs of abuse affect the developing brain, with a particular emphasis on exposure during pregnancy.
"My main project is looking at the effects of drug abuse, from pregnancy through adolescence until adulthood,” she says, "testing therapeutics and trying to understand if that can affect the intake for drugs later on."
Her academic path began with a biology undergraduate degree, followed by a master's in neuropsychopharmacology and a doctorate in neuroscience from Università degli Studi di Cagliari. She completed her postdoctoral work at UC Irvine in California, expanding her work to include behavioral and molecular approaches, focusing on extracellular vesicles as a mechanism of cell communication, alongside her pharmacology background.
Lallai says a neuropharmacology course during her undergraduate studies first sparked her passion for the field.
"Studying the effect of substances that just activate receptors and cells in our body, that was the opening for me," she says.
When it came time to search for a faculty position, Lallai says the friendliness of the College of Pharmacy faculty and staff set it apart from other opportunities.
"Everybody was super welcoming, and I felt I was having conversations with people that I met three years ago, not just two hours before," she says.
Outside the lab, Lallai runs 10Ks and half marathons, cooks with her husband, and enjoys attending live music concerts. The couple made the cross-country move by road trip, accompanied by their large Labrador-Weimaraner mix, Ziggy.
She says arriving in Columbia left an immediate impression.
"Coming from California and all the desert landscape, this is like a jungle," she says. "I am very impressed by the greenery. The university is a beautiful place. And I like grits!”
Topics: Drug Discovery and Biomedical Sciences, Research, Faculty and Staff