Professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology

Department: Pharmacology and Toxicology

The support letters for the nomination of S. Stevens Negus III, Ph.D. as this year’s Distinguished Mentor come not only from colleagues and students at VCU, but from former students and postdoctoral fellows across the US and Europe. They describe him as an inspirational mentor with an open-door policy, exceptional approachability and a collaborative spirit. They note his ability to present complex material with clarity, laying a solid foundation on which to develop critical thinking skills. His chair, William Dewey, Ph.D., notes, “Steve presents material in a manner that demands your concentration and does it in such a way that when he is finished you are amazed by what you have learned.” John Bigbee, Ph.D., Professor and Neuroscience Program Director, Anatomy and Neurobiology, describes Dr. Negus as an “unrivaled” primary mentor, who “truly finds joy in his students’ success,” many of whom “have not only successfully performed cutting edge, ground breaking research, but they have been recognized nationally with a number of awards, fellowships and publications in the highest rated journals. They have all successfully transitioned to the next stages of their training.”

Dr. Negus earned his Ph.D. in Neurobiology in 1990 from UNC-Chapel Hill, after which he held two concurrent postdoctoral fellowships in the fields of neuropharmacology and anesthesiology at Scripps Research Institute and UC-San Diego, respectively. In 1991 he began his career as a Research Investigator in Pharmacology at the University of Michigan before spending 14 years at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School. In 2007 Dr. Negus joined VCU SOM in the position of Professor of Pharmacology and Toxicology. Dr. Negus’s current research focuses on the development of safer and more effective analgesics, and the pharmacology and treatment of drug abuse. He has obtained funding for his research from more than 25 grants since 1990. He is a member of nine professional societies related to drugs, neuroscience, pharmacology, and pain. He serves on the editorial board of four journals and has been an ad hoc reviewer for 18 journals since 1990. In 2013 Dr. Negus was named chair of the NIH Study Section on Somatosensory and Chemosensory Systems. He has received four previous awards at VCU: Students’ Choice for Professor of the Year in 2012 and 2018 and Outstanding Departmental Teacher Award in Health Science Education in 2015 and 2019.

Dr. Negus has mentored 14 graduate students, supervised 14 postdoctoral fellows, and served on dissertation committees for 38 doctoral candidates. He has also supervised 19 undergraduate or graduate research projects and rotations at VCU. He has given invited lectures more than 100 times nationally and internationally. Dr. Negus has published 242 original articles, edited two special journal issues and one book, and has a bibliography that includes 47 reviews, chapters, and editorials. As of June 1, 2022, his work has been cited 12,677 times. Former doctoral student Clare M. Diester, Ph.D., currently Postdoctoral Researcher at Schier Lab, Biozentrum, University of Basel, comments on Dr. Negus’s emphasis on scientific integrity, recalling, “He teaches in the lab to never ‘hope’ for a specific outcome, rather to ‘hope’ for a good experiment . . . Steve mentors that tying your scientific identity to your hypothesis can lead to being tied to beliefs rather than data and shows the dangers through personal experiences and current-day examples of what that can do to fields and careers.” A former graduate student in Dr. Negus’s lab, Luke Legakis, M.D., Ph.D., currently a hospital resident at Yale SOM, summarizes, “I could not craft from my imagination a better mentor or teacher than Dr. Negus. This stems from his incredible ability to set up a mental framework for understanding and approach [of] a theoretical or research question." Dr. Legakis sums up Dr. Negus’s legacy as follows: “The ability to lead a student down a path to find the answer to a question that the student knew the whole time is truly a gift . . . when knowledge is gained from within, it sticks, and it sticks for good . . . To put it simply, Dr. Negus makes his students better students. I can think of no other person in my entire academic career who is more suitable for this award . . . .”

Back to Listing