Harald H. Sitte

Harald H. Sitte is Professor of Psychopharmacology at the Medical University in Vienna, Austria, Center of Physiology and Pharmacology. Early in his career as a medical student, Dr Sitte learned about the enigmatic mechanistic understanding of the action of psychostimulants such as amphetamine. Soon after, he got interested in basic neurochemistry and neurodegenerative disease. However, the mechanism of amphetamine action – and various congeners – never really left his scientific focus. Furthermore, he assessed the importance of regulatory kinases for amphetamine’s effects in vitro and in behavioral pharmacological experiments. Apart from the work on psychostimulants, Dr Sitte examined the behavior and functional role of oligomerization of various neurotransmitter transporters. A scientific visit to the Panum Institute (Professor U. Gether) in Copenhagen, Denmark initiated his interest in protein biochemistry and fluorescence spectroscopy. Based on this work, he and his team started to explore bacterial homologs of neurotransmitter transporters on an atomistic level. More recently, his lab became interested in the interplay between membrane lipids and their impact on transporter function as well as on their oligomeric properties; again, amphetamines were part of this research work.