When associate professor Ralph Raasch, PharmD, attends the annual Family Day event at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy these days, chances are good that he will see some familiar faces among the students’ parents.

“I guarantee there would be current students in the audience whose parents, one or both, were a student in the audience here with me X number of years ago,” says Raasch, who has been teaching at the School since 1976.

“I guess in some cases that means the parent appreciates the process they went through, not because of me, but they liked their discipline so they didn’t discourage their son or daughter from pursuing the same discipline.”

While Raasch is modest in assessing the impact he has had on his students, they and his peers beg to differ. He received UNC’s Tanner Distinguished Teacher Award in 1979 and was named the University Professor of Distinguished Teaching in 2001. He was named an ACCP fellow in 2000 and received the Education Award at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the American College of Clinical Pharmacy in October.

In addition, Raasch has received his share of teaching awards at the School. He has been named the School’s Instructor of the Year four times and Professor of the Year for the PharmD program three times.

“The key to that is easy exams,” Raasch quips.

If that were the case, then he must have given the Class of 2009 a lot of easy exams. For their class gift, the students created the Ralph H. Raasch Scholarship, which will provide a $3,000 award to a student each year.

“That’s part of this whole gratifying environment here,” Raasch says. “On occasion you get credit or recognition for your hard work. Not that you are in the business for that credit or recognition, but it’s gratifying to feel appreciated. I’ve been pleased to be able to contribute to that scholarship and I will continue to. I’m really honored by it.”

Raasch came to UNC-Chapel Hill as an instructor and practitioner in 1976 after earning his doctor of pharmacy and completing a residency at the University of California, San Francisco. He became an assistant professor in the School’s Division of Pharmacy Practice in 1978.

It was a time of change and growth for the division and the School’s curriculum. The School’s entry-level degree at the time was a bachelor of science in pharmacy, but there was a nationwide push to shift to a program that gave its graduates more experience. In the summer of 1981, the School launched a two-year, post-baccalaureate doctor of pharmacy program, with Raasch as the program director.

“The impetus for the PharmD was that there appeared to be on the horizon a nationwide transition to PharmD programs at most schools of pharmacy, as well as a desire to enhance the clinical training in a degree program that one could acquire,” Raasch says.

“There were pharmacy residencies in those days, so the opportunity to get more training was available. But there really wasn’t an opportunity to get more didactic prepatory training in small groups with lots of discussion and lots of literature analysis that a post-BS PharmD program would allow.”

The School’s post-BS PharmD program had a strong patient-oriented focus and included ten clerkship months, seven more than in the BS program.

“Someone who might get into a community pharmacy practice, instead of having one or two months of experience in the old BS days, with predetermined and accomplished selection of electives in community practice, might have five or six months of experience,” Raasch says. “So they may have had some experience with medication therapy management that they won’t have had before, and so forth. It facilitates a quicker move to being to able to do certain activities more comfortably than if one didn’t have that experience.”

The post-BS PharmD program began with five students in 1981 and increased to fifteen in later years. Raasch oversaw the program until 1997, a year after the School made the PharmD its entry-level degree, turning it into a six-year program.

These days, Raasch’s primary focuses remain teaching and practice. His main teaching responsibility is organizing the infectious diseases module for PY3 students. On the practice side, he serves as a clinical pharmacist with the Infectious Diseases Consult Service at UNC Hospitals.

Raasch’s PharmD classes have gone from having only a handful of students in the 1980s to about 150 these days, but one aspect of his approach to teaching has remained the same — providing an active learning environment where he’s asking more questions than his students.

“In a clinical environment, we don’t show a lot of slides when we talk about Mr. Smith or Mrs. Jones’ hypertension or urinary tract infection,” he says. “We don’t show slides on rounds. We have conversations; we have data in front of us.

“So I try to mimic that scenario when we are in the classroom. So we have a case study; we have a urine culture; we have past medical history; we have travel history. We have data in front of us that we then try to use to focus on ‘What are the therapeutic directions that make the most sense here?’ We didn’t have PowerPoint slides when we started the PharmD program, and I don’t have PowerPoint slides now, for the most part.”