UC Santa Barbara

Pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics are two subfields in the area of pharmacology that investigate how substances are processed within, and affect the body. Pharmacokinetics studies how a particular substance (e.g., a drug) is processed after being administrated into the body, while pharmacodynamics studies how the presence of a substance affects a subject’s physiology or biochemistry. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, the research labs of Professors Kevin Plaxco and Tod Kippin actively collaborate to advance measurement device technology, and scientific understanding, within these two disciplines. The work presented here is motivated by scientific questions arising within the Plaxco and Kippin Labs, and can be broken up into two parts. The first part uses innovative statistical methods to model pharmacodynamic data from rat model behavioral choice studies from the Kippin Lab, while the second part uses more traditional statistical methods to assess evidence for dynamic drug elimination rates based on newly-available time-dense pharmacokinetic data from UCSB-developed in-vivo sensors.