April 2013
Vol. 6, No. 4

• School
• Faculty
• Students
• Staff
• Faculty Spotlight
• Staff Profile
  

I would like to extend the warmest of welcomes from the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy to Carol Folt, PhD, who has been named Carolina’s eleventh chancellor and will succeed Holden Thorp, PhD, on July 1. Folt comes to us from Dartmouth College where she serves as interim president and the Dartmouth Professor of Biological Sciences. Thorp has been a great supporter of the School, and we wish him the greatest success as he assumes the post of provost at Washington University in St. Louis.

School

The UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy held its annual Awards Day ceremony on Sunday, April 14, recognizing some of the best and brightest among our students and faculty. I’d like to call special attention to Adam Persky, PhD, who was named the School’s Overall Instructor of the Year, and to PY4 Jon Hale who received the Burrus Award for Community Service as did alumna Evelyn Lloyd of Hillsborough. You can read more about Hale and our other instructors of the year below. Visit our website for the complete list of award recipients.

We continue to build early partnerships and lay plans for the Academy, the School’s initiative aimed at enriching the development of faculty as educators and coordinating and stimulating educational research and the scholarship of education. The Academy website (pharmacy.unc.edu/academy) will soon be live and will provide a place for the School community to turn for resources and to remain abreast of efforts ongoing within the School and among our educators. If you have any questions, comments, or just want to learn more, Mary Roth McClurg encourages you to contact her or stop by 322 Beard.

Faculty

Congratulations to the faculty members who were honored by our students as instructors of the year at Awards Day on April 14. We had both first-time and repeat winners this year, and I would like to add my thanks to that of our students for these instructors who go the extra mile in the classroom and in the clinic.

• Overall Instructor of the Year: Adam Persky, PhD
• PY1 Instructor of the Year: Russ Mumper, PhD
• PY2 Instructor of the Year: Bob Dupuis, PharmD
• PY3 Instructor of the Year: Heidi Anksorus, PharmD
• Preceptor of the Year: Edward Sredzienski, MS, UNC Hospitals
• Experiential Faculty Instructor of the Year: Debra Kemp, PharmD

		Suzanne Harris, PharmD, has joined PACE as director of the UNC Hospital region experiential education program and a clinical assistant professor. Harris has been associated with the School since 2003 in various capacities including directing a PGY2 specialty residency in psychiatry for three years and the Clinical Scholars Program for four years. For the past four years, she has practiced as a clinical pharmacy specialist at Central Regional Hospital in Butner, North Carolina. Harris received her doctor of pharmacy from the University of Texas at Austin and completed a clinical pharmacy specialty residency in psychiatry with Kaiser Permanente in Denver. She is a board-certified psychiatric pharmacist.
		Pam Joyner, EdD, has been appointed as chair of the University's Teaching and Awards Committee. The committee reviews nominations for six University teaching awards, collects additional information, and  recommends winners to the chancellor. Joyner is executive associate dean for professional education and a clinical associate professor in PACE.

		The UNC Board of Trustees have approved the awarding of the John A. and Deborah S. McNeill Jr. Distinguished Professorship to Angela Kashuba, PharmD, and the Ron and Nancy McFarlane Distinguished Professorship in Pharmacy Practice to Denise Rhoney, PharmD. Congratulations to both of these distinguished faculty members on these honors. The School also expresses its gratitude to the McFarlanes and the McNeills for the extraordinary generosity they have shown in creating these endowed professorships.
		Kelly Scolaro, PharmD, was named Volunteer of the Week by the Durham Herald-Sun for her work with Senior PharmAssist. Scolaro is a clinical assistant professor in PACE and director of the Pharmaceutical Care Lab.

Students

Four of our graduate students are recipients of the 2013 Impact Awards from the UNC Graduate School. The awards recognize outstanding grad students whose research covers a wide variety of areas. Congratulations to our winners, and you can read more about their work on our website by following the links below.

• James Byrne (MOPH) designed and fabricated an electric field-assisted delivery device that would administer gemcitabine directly into pancreatic cancer tumors. Preliminary evaluations showed a greater reduction in tumor volume using the device compared to IV gemcitabine.
• Rishi Desai (DPOP) examined medication errors in North Carolina's nursing homes and found that 11 percent of the errors involved an individual's transition into nursing-home care. These errors were more likely to result in patient harm compared to mistakes made later.
• Dan Hertz, PharmD, PhD, (DPET) studied patients taking the cancer drug paclitaxel, and found that people with a certain genetic marker are more likely to experience a progressive loss of dexterity and balance as a side effect of taking the drug.
• Jasmine Talameh, PharmD, (DPET) identified a genetic marker that could potentially be used to identify heart-failure patients who would benefit from beta-blockers, which improve heart function in only about 25 percent of patients.

Three student-faculty teams from the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy have been named Walmart Scholars by the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, marking the seventh consecutive year that the School has had at least one recipient for the award and the second year with three. Each student-faculty pair receives a $1,000 scholarship to help cover registration and travel costs for the AACP Annual Meeting and the AACP Teachers Seminar in Chicago July 13–17. The School’s 2013 winners are

• PGY2 resident Ashley Hannings, PharmD, and clinical assistant professor Macary Marciniak, PharmD;
• PGY1 resident Abby Matulewicz, PharmD, and clinical assistant professor Daniel Forrester, PharmD; and
• Academic fellow Jamie Shelly, PharmD, and clinical assistant professor Kelly Scolaro, PharmD.

PY4 Jon Hale is the 2013 recipient of the Samuel Burrus Award for Community Service. As a veteran of the U.S. Army, Hale was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal, the Iraq Campaign Medal, and the Kosovo Campaign Medal. He has also invested considerable time and effort into the VALOR Pharmacy Internship at the Durham VA Medical Center. Hale has twice served as a volunteer pharmacy technician, once with Hands of Compassion counseling patients in Spanish during a mission trip to Ecuador and then at Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital in Greensboro, NC. Hale is the organist for his church as well as the member missionary leader, the activities committee chair, and a Sunday school teacher. At the School, he is a member of the Phi Lambda Sigma Pharmacy Leadership Society and was the chapter vice president during 2011–12. Hale is a member of the North Carolina Pharmacists Association and served as the association’s student liaison from 2010 to 2012. He has played substantial roles in the Carolina Association of Pharmacy Students, the Student Health Action Coalition – Beyond Clinic Walls, and Taking Action by Service. Hale is a past recipient of the Dorothy Virginia Stroud Memorial Award and the Herman and Ernestine Lynch Scholarship.

Staff

Faculty Spotlight: Russell J. Mumper, PhD

Russ Mumper’s role at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy has expanded dramatically since he arrived at the School six years ago with the “simple” job of directing the new Center for Nanotechnology in Drug Delivery. A passion for teaching and interest in and aptitude for academic administration made him the natural choice to take on the many responsibilities of executive associate dean and then vice dean of the School, in addition to being the John A. McNeill Distinguished Professor.

Mumper received his BA in chemistry and PhD in pharmaceutics and drug delivery from the University of Kentucky. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Bioengineering at the University of Washington in 1992, Mumper held various product-development positions in the pharmaceutical and biotech industry from 1992 to 1999.  He returned to the in the College of Pharmacy at the University of Kentucky in 1999 as a faculty member in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences and associate director of the Center for Pharmaceutical Science and Technology before making the move to Chapel Hill in 2007.

Over his career, Mumper has received more than $10.2 million in research grants and contracts as principal investigator (and over $28.2 million total) and has authored more than 275 scientific publications and abstracts and has forty-three patents or patents pending. In 2009, he was elected Fellow of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists. Along the way, he also cofounded five companies.

Success in the lab has gone hand in hand with success in the classroom for Mumper. At Kentucky, Mumper was recognized as one of six Great Teachers, the oldest, continuously given award for teaching at UK. Here at Carolina, Mumper is well known for teaching Basic Pharmaceutics II, a course taken by first-year PharmD students who chose him as their class’s instructor of the year in 2012 and 2013. This year, Mumper was also honored with the Distinguished Teaching Award for Post-Baccalaureate Instruction, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s highest teaching honor.

In his role as vice dean, Mumper manages initiatives that cut across professional education and graduate education—such as instructional technology, distance education, and programmatic expansion—and serves as the initial leader for new projects. Mumper has played a key role as leader of the School’s efforts to transform teaching and learning in its classrooms and to revamp the doctor of pharmacy curriculum to prepare students for the role envisioned for pharmacists in the near future.

Staff Profile: Lorna DeWalle

Lorna DeWalle joined the Office of Advancement in 2010 as financial administrator for the Pharmacy Foundation of North Carolina. She provides all accounting services to the office, including processing gifts, funding requests, preparing financial statement, and budgeting. She works closely with the Foundation’s board of directors to administer the Foundation’s $35 million in assets.

DeWalle is a member of the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy’s scholarship committee and is responsible for coordinating the distribution of more than 150 scholarships and awards annually worth more than $600,000.

After receiving her BS from Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, DeWalle spent four years in the Boston office of KPMG providing audit services to clients in retail and mutual fund industries. She went on to work in auditing and accounting in various industries, including a multibillion dollar supermarket chain and the Maricopa County Internal Audit. She spent three years with ING Group in Amsterdam auditing business units in Asia and Australia.

DeWalle moved to Cary from Boston in 2008 with her family and is confident that this year the Red Sox will win the World Series. She is a certified public accountant and a member of the North Carolina Association of CPAs.