Thomas A. Rudy, Professor of Pharmacology, retired this January after a 35 year appointment in the School of Pharmacy. Dr. Rudy’s principal focus in recent years has been teaching required and elective coursework in the professional and undergraduate curricula, including Pharmacology I, Nonprescription Medications, Substance Abuse & Chemical Dependence, and Laboratory Techniques in Pharmacology & Toxicology. His impact in the classroom was recognized by the student body repeatedly—he was named “Teacher of the Year” six times by the third-year Doctor of Pharmacy classes and three times by students in the B.S. Pharmacology/ Toxicology program. Nadir Hinnawi, a fourth-year Pharm.D. student, commented:
“Thank you (Dr. Rudy), for your dedication and compassion as a professor.
Your expectations and demands for high standards molded us into the
great pharmacists we are today. Current students and alumni can proudly
say that they were taught by Professor Thomas Rudy”.
Rudy received a B.S. Pharmacy from The Ohio State University and graduated with a Ph.D. in pharmacology from Ohio State in 1969 under the direction of Harold Wolf. He was a NIH postdoctoral trainee in Purdue University’s Laboratory of Neuropsychology before coming to Wisconsin in 1971.
Dr. Rudy’s research focused on two distinct areas: the pharmacology and physiology of body temperature regulation and the sites and mechanisms of action of opioid analgesics. His contributions in the thermoregulatory field included studies of central nervous system noradrenergic, serotonergic and cholinergic pathways involved in the control of body temperature and the demonstration that fever caused by traumatic brain injury or hemorrhagic stroke (“neurogenic hyperthermia”) is mediated by an action on the anterior hypothalamic/preoptic area of prostaglandins released from injured neural tissue. Neurogenic hyperthermias had been previously viewed as therapy resistant, unregulated temperature increases arising from a damaged neural control system. Dr. Rudy’s studies revealed that they are in fact true fevers, that is, elevations of the setpoint for thermoregulation, and that they respond to sufficiently high doses of prostaglandin synthesis inhibitors.
With respect to the pharmacology of opioids, Dr. Rudy’s lab helped map out the brain sites where opioids act to produce analgesia. His lab was the first to demonstrate that morphine has a spinal cord site of action and that pain relief produced by morphine involves a synergistic interplay between morphine actions in the brain and spinal cord. The widely used clinical technique of injecting opioids in the spinal subarachnoid or subdural space to relieve intractable pain is a direct consequence of this work. Rudy’s work also stimulated considerable interest in and use of isobolographic analysis, a mathematical technique for analyzing the interaction between simultaneous actions of one drug at two sites or two drugs at one site.
Dr. Rudy has decided to remain active teaching in his retirement, and will continue to lecture in Pharmacology I and in Substance Abuse & Chemical Dependence in the short-term. He hopes to catch up in his reading—outside of scientific literature—now that he is retired, and plans to audit courses in Spanish, history, and the humanities at UW-Madison. He has concluded that his “skydiving days” are behind him.
The Pharmaceutical Sciences Division and the School of Pharmacy family at large thank Dr. Rudy for his years of dedication to the mission of the School. Dr. Rudy has been granted honorary emeritus status by UW-Madison.