August 2009

School     Faculty     Students     Spotlight

Welcome, everyone, to another year at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy. These are certainly extraordinary times. The School is growing in almost every category: enrollment, square footage, research funding, faculty. We have worked hard to sustain our momentum in the face of the current economic climate.

This year—like last year—will challenge us given the state of the economy and the state’s finances. While you may have read that the UNC system budget was cut 7 percent, the University has cut our budget by 10 percent in anticipation of additional reductions. Absorbing these cuts is very difficult, and we’ve gone to great lengths to ensure no reduction in the quality of our programs. In fact, I believe we have actually improved them by adding faculty and continuing to pursue innovation in the classroom through our educational-renaissance initiatives.

We have assumed a leadership position on campus in terms of streamlining our operations and seeking out more economical ways of conducting business. You may have read about the Bain report, a collection of recommendations made by a consulting firm to the University for making the campus run more efficiently. We have been working on a similar plan here at the School for the past two years.

School

While the flow of resources from the state is slowing, the University reports that total research funding received by UNC faculty is up 5.6 percent over last year, reaching an all-time high of $716 million. Among the colleges and schools on campus, we are fourth in research funding earned, trailing only units many times larger than we are. According to UNC numbers, we are up 22 percent over last year’s research totals. (Note that you might see variations in the amounts of funding reported by the University and by organizations such as AACP. These are due to differences in the start of NIH and UNC fiscal years.)

I want to recognize all the hard work of our faculty, staff, and students that has made the growth of our research enterprise possible. It has taken a tremendous amount of effort to take us from twenty-fourth in research funding among the nation’s pharmacy schools six years ago to second last year. This growth has enabled us to deal with budget cuts while maintaining excellence in our teaching and research programs.

Faculty

I would like to commend Carla White Harris for the outstanding work she has done as director of diversity and recruitment initiatives. This summer she launched the Carolina LEAD program geared toward underserved and underrepresented high school and college students. The program brought the students to the School for a first-hand introduction to our profession. The only complaint the students had was one day wasn’t enough: they wanted more. She also brought together a group of our alumni with School and University administrators for an alumni summit to discuss ideas for encouraging more minority students to consider pharmacy as a career. Finally, the video she produced for the AACP “Is Pharmacy for You” video contest [LINK] tied for first place. The piece is an edited version of the longer recruitment video she produced a few years ago that is one of the most popular videos on the University’s Youtube channel with well over 11,000 unique views. 

Students

Mary Carroll, a graduate student in the Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products, presented her research during the Medicinal Chemistry Graduate Student Award Symposium at the 238th American Chemical Society National Meeting on August 17 in Washington, D.C. The presentation was titled “Small molecule approach in studying the dynamics of E. coli dihydrofolate reductase.” It was part of Carroll’s ACS Pfizer Fellowship for the 2008-09 academic year.

Rima Hajjo, a graduate student in MedicinalChem, has been selected to make a podium presentation about her research during the AAPS Annual Meeting and Exposition in Los Angeles on November 10. Her research focuses on polypharmacology, network pharmacology, and computational screening of the GPCR receptorome.

Faculty Spotlight: Kim Brouwer, PharmD, PhD

Kim Brouwer, PhamD, PhD

• Read more about Brouwer's work

On July 1, Kim Brouwer, chair of the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics, became one of the University’s newest William R. Kenan Distinguished Professor. She joins K. H. Lee, PhD, and Hal Kohn, PhD, the other members of our faculty who hold this high honor.

Brouwer, who has been with the School since 1986, focuses on the mechanisms of hepatic uptake, translocation, and biliary excretion—in other words, how drugs are processed by the liver. She and a colleague developed B-CLEAR, an in vitro system that can be used to predict how a drug will be absorbed and excreted by the liver of a living organism. Her innovation led to her cofounding a company in 2001 along with Gary Pollack, PhD, and Dhiren Thakker, PhD. The company, named Qualyst, counts more than half of the top-tier pharmaceutical companies as B-CLEAR customers. Brouwer continues to probe the liver’s role in processing drugs and explore the causes of and ways to prevent drug-induced liver injury.

She served as a member of the NIH Pharmacology Study Section from 1998 to 2002 and is a member of the editorial boards for Drug Metabolism and Disposition, Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, and the AAPS Journal. She was elected an AAPS Fellow in 1998, was recipient of the PHRMA Foundation Award in Excellence in Pharmaceutics in 2001, and recently received the inaugural Pharmaceutical Sciences Outstanding Graduate Program Alumni Award and the Paul F. Parker Award from the University of Kentucky.