steApril 2012
Vol. 5, No. 4

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

Dean Bob Blouin (left) presents Keith Krumpe with the Distinguished Service Award.

Keith Krumpe, PhD, is the recipient of this year’s Distinguished Service Award from the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy. Krumpe is the dean of natural sciences at the University of North Carolina at Asheville and has been a member of the faculty there since 1992. He was chair of the UNC Asheville chemistry department from 2003 to 2009.

The School launched its new Asheville satellite campus in fall 2011. It would have been a much more difficult process without Krumpe serving as our advocate, collaborator, and on-site champion in Asheville. He was tireless and selfless in working to make the new satellite campus a reality in one short year. Never did he say something could not be done; his only concern was how we could do it and how we could do it well.

In his research, Krumpe focuses on the synthesis of biologically active molecules and the development of new synthetic methodologies. In the classroom, he teaches lower-level organic chemistry, upper-level organic-focused chemistry, and general chemistry, primarily the first-semester course at UNC Asheville. The Pittsburgh native received his PhD from Emory University.

Krumpe was recognized at the School’s Awards Day ceremony held April 29 at the Rizzo Center (complete list of winners and photos of the event).

School

The NIH has funded two additional positions in the T32 clinical pharmacology postdoctoral fellowship program administered by the School in collaboration with Duke University and the Hamner Institute for Drug Safety Sciences. This expands a five-year collaborative training grant established to prepare clinician-scientists to become leaders in clinical pharmacology. This program is one of only a handful of T32 training programs in the nation and the only one hosted by a school of pharmacy. Kim Brouwer, PharmD, PhD, William R. Kenan Distinguished Professor, and Paul Watkins, MD, director of the Hamner Institute for Drug Safety Sciences and a professor in DPET, are two of the program’s principal investigators while Angela Kashuba, PharmD, manages the day-to-day operations of the program along with a counterpart at Duke.

The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists has accredited the School’s PGY2 Community Pharmacy Residency Program for three years, making ours the first program of its kind in the nation to be accredited. I would like to recognize Macary Marciniak, PharmD, and Stefanie Ferreri, PharmD, for their leadership in developing this groundbreaking residency.

Faculty

It gives me great pleasure to recognize the School’s instructors of the year for 2012. I am extremely proud of these faculty members, some of whom are repeat winners, and would like to thank them for the extraordinary effort they make in the classroom.

You can read more about the honors given out at the School’s Awards Day ceremony (with photos) at http://pharmacy.unc.edu/news/schoolnews/photos-awards-day-2012.

Joe DeSimone, PhD, Chancellor’s Eminent Professor of Chemistry and a joint professor in MOPH, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of his distinguished and continuing achievement in original research.

Students

Dean Bob Blouin presents the Samuel Burrus Award for Community Service to PY2 Jody Church.

PY2 Jody Church is the winner of the School’s Samuel Burrus Award for Community Service. Church has worked diligently to further the Student Health Action Coalition Clinic’s mission of assisting the underserved in the community. As the clinic’s codirector, she spends the majority of her Wednesday evenings providing affordable health care to people in the community. She is responsible for setting up the clinic, running leadership meetings, and developing clinic improvements, as well as maintaining relationships with volunteers, attending physicians, and patients.

Her dedication to service extends beyond the clinic. She recently took a medical Spanish course in Costa Rica to better prepare herself to counsel Spanish-speaking individuals. She is also the Relay for Life coordinator for the Carolina Association of Pharmacy Students, helping raise awareness and funding for cancer research. On top of all of her service commitments, Church also works as a pharmacy intern at Kerr Drug.

For more on the School’s Awards Day ceremony—including photos—visit http://pharmacy.unc.edu/news/schoolnews/photos-awards-day-2012.

Staff

The School’s IT department is the winner of a 2012 UNC IT Award. This is the second time our IT department has received the award, which recognizes their willingness to go above and beyond in their duties. I would like to thank and congratulate Dave Maldonado, David Dombek, Deric Freeman, John Meeker, and Bill Vogt for their outstanding work.

Brittany Cross, PhD, has joined the Division of Molecular Pharmaceutics as a postdoctoral research associate. Cross is a cancer biologist who received her PhD from the University of South Florida.

Ju Youn Beak, PhD, is a new postdoctoral research associate in CBMC.

Dimple Harit, PhD, is a new research associate in MOPH working in the lab of Sam Lai, PhD. Before coming to UNC, she worked as a postdoc at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences, Bethesda, MD. She received her PhD from the University of Calcutta in India.

Chatura Jayakody, who has been a research associate in the Center for Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery since 2010, is now a permanent member of the staff.  Prior to joining UNC, Jayakody interned at Blue Sky Biotech in Worchester, MA.

Sara Metzger, MS, is now a permanent research specialist in DPET working in the lab of Bill Zamboni, PharmD, PhD. Metzger is an analytical chemist who has been at UNC-Chapel Hill since August. She received her master’s degree from the University in 2006.

Regina Politi, PhD, is a postdoctoral research associate in CBMC working in the lab of Alex Tropsha, PhD.

Staff Profile: Lauren McQuillan

Lauren McQuillan joined the School in July 2011 as the executive assistant to Dhiren Thakker, PhD, and Alex Tropsha, PhD, and operates at the interface between the School’s research enterprise, economic-development efforts, and international outreach. Before coming to North Carolina, she worked for six years as an executive administrator and paralegal for law firms in Chicago, Washington D.C., and Australia.

McQuillan is working to develop a complete picture of the School’s research capabilities with the end goal of making our faculty more competitive. She has taken the lead in coordinating with the University on its Big Pharma initiative, an effort to catalog the strengths and gaps in the drug-development process at the School. As part of this effort, she recently completed a survey of the School’s faculty and engendered 100 percent participation from research-intensive divisions. She is key to our broad mission of translating research into tangible outcomes and to our efforts to capitalize on intellectual property developed by School faculty, trainees, and students. She assists faculty with the tasks required to create spin-off companies from their research programs, including building a management team, finding funding sources, and securing facilities.

The annual meeting of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists will be held in Chicago this October, and McQuillan is planning the School’s reception, one of our most highly visible events of the year. She is also our liaison to a number of people and groups such as the vice chancellor for research, corporate and foundation relations; the Office of Technology Development, and ReachNC.

McQuillan holds a BA in environmental studies from Vassar College.

Faculty Spotlight: Christine Oramasionwu, PharmD, PhD

Christine Oramasionwu joined the Division of Pharmaceutical Outcomes and Policy as an assistant professor in August after completing her PhD at the University of Texas. Her research interests lie in the areas of HIV and AIDS, health outcomes, and health disparities in minority, underserved, and international populations.

She is now embarking on projects that focus on medication-use patterns, barriers to treatment, and comorbid conditions in patients with HIV/AIDS. For example, she recently submitted a grant proposal that seeks to assess how a patient’s race and ethnicity influences barriers to receiving hepatitis C therapy among HIV patients who are infected with the hepatitis C virus. The results of this pilot study will serve as preliminary data for future studies that will assess how barriers to therapy change for co-infected minority patients as newer medications for hepatitis C infection become available. The intent of Oramasionwu's research is to develop interventions that improve access to therapy for these patients. The National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities Loan Repayment Program has funded Oramasionwu’s research endeavors.

Oramasionwu is a member of the American College of Clinical Pharmacy, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research. She is a board-certified pharmacotherapy specialist, a licensed pharmacist, and the author of sixteen peer-reviewed articles.