BlouInsight, May 2012
May 2012
Vol. 5, No. 5
The unsettled weather held off for twenty-four hours to give us a beautiful day for our 2012 Commencement ceremony on May 12. Liz Hayes, MEd, led the planning for the event this year with the able assistance of Andrew Clapper, Rochelle Hurt, Rosa McDonald, Rebecca Wetter, and Brad Wingo, MEd. I would like to thank them all for the excellent work they did in making the event special and memorable for our graduates and their families. I also want to express our appreciation to Ed Webb, PharmD, MPH, associate executive director of government and professional affairs for the American College of Clinical Pharmacy, who served as our graduation speaker.
You can view photos of the events taken by Randall Roberts of our advancement office. The after-graduation plans of our PharmD graduates are also posted on our website.
School
The School will hold its annual Graduate Program Retreat on Monday, August 20, from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. at the North Carolina Botanical Gardens. Some highlights of this year’s retreat include the participation of incoming graduate students, a student poster competition for travel awards, the student awards ceremony, and a picnic.
Faculty
It is with great pleasure that I announce that two new faculty members will be joining the School in July from the University of Nebraska: Alexander “Sasha” Kabanov, PhD, DrSci, and Elena Batrakova, PhD.
Kabanov is the Parke-Davis Professor in Pharmaceutics and director of the Center for Drug Delivery and Nanomedicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Kabanov established the field of polymer genomics, which investigates the effects of polymers and nanomaterials on cellular responses to develop safe and efficient therapeutics. He is a pioneer in the use of nanotechnology to treat cancer and other diseases and is known for his discovery of a polymer that enables medications to pass through cancer cell membranes, making the medications up to one thousand times more effective against drug-resistant tumors than conventional chemotherapeutic agents. This technology also holds promise for more effective treatment of diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Batrakova is a research associate professor at UNMC who focuses on developing a cell-mediated active delivery of therapeutic polypeptides to the brain for treatment of Parkinson's disease using inflammatory-response cells as vehicles. She is also devoted to the development of a new drug delivery polymer-based system of chemotherapy to treat multidrug-resistant tumors, and central nervous system disorders.
Kabanov and Batrakova will be joining the Division of Molecular Pharmaceutics with Kabanov taking the reins as new director of the Center for Nanotechnology in Drug Delivery. I want to thank Russ Mumper, PhD, who has served as the first director of the center since 2007. Many of you have been deeply involved in helping these new colleagues make the transition to UNC, and I thank you for your efforts as this is certainly no small task. Kabanov and Batrakova will be bringing a team of eighteen researchers with them, including postdoctoral fellows, research managers, technicians, three research faculty, and five graduate students, who will transfer to Carolina.
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Daniel Forrister, PharmD, has joined the School as a clinical assistant professor in PPEE and PCL coordinator in Asheville, where he will relieve Greene Shepherd, PharmD, who has been serving as the PCL coordinator in addition to his duties as director of professional education in Asheville. Forrister was a clinical assistant professor at the University of Georgia College of Pharmacy from 2007 to 2010 and most recently served in Malawi with Doctors without Borders. He received his PharmD from the School in 2006 and completed a community practice residency with UNC and Kerr Drug in Raleigh. |
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Craig Lee, PharmD, PhD, has been promoted to associate professor with tenure in DPET. Lee joined the faculty in 2006 after completing his doctor of pharmacy, his PhD, and a fellowship here at the School. |
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Mary Paine, PhD, an assistant professor in DPET, has been named an associate editor of the journal Drug Metabolism and Disposition. |
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Chad Petit, PhD, has joined CBMC as a research assistant professor working with Drew Lee, PhD. He has been a postdoc as the School since 2006. Petit received his PhD in molecular virology from Louisiana State University. |
Students
This year the American Foundation for Pharmaceutical Education has awarded $6,500 Predoctoral Fellowships in Pharmaceutical Science to seven of our graduate students out of twelve applications submitted. This is the largest number of both AFPE applications and awards in recent memory. Congratulations to Whitney Caron (whose existing fellowship has been renewed), Dan Crona, Adam Friedman, Akinyemi Oni-Orisan, Melanie Nicol, Michael Perfetti, and Nicole Zane.
Anne Beaubrun, a DPOP graduate student, received a partial travel scholarship from the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology to attend the International Conference on Pharmacoepidemiology conference in Spain in August.
Incoming graduate student Corbin Thompson has been awarded a $7,500 Rho Chi-AFPE First Year Graduate School Fellowship
Staff
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Eileen Belding has taken a permanent position as an executive associate in the research group of K.H. Lee, PhD. Belding had been serving in a temporary capacity since coming to the School in August 2010. |
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Brad Dickson, PhD, is a new postdoctoral research associate in the Division of Chemical Biology and Medicinal Chemistry working in the lab of Dmitri Kireev, PhD. Dickson completed his graduate and undergraduate education at Clemson University. Since 2007, he has served as a postdoctoral researcher at Purdue University, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and Université Paris Est, and the University of Texas at Austin. |
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Lynne Skinner will be joining CBMC as the division’s executive assistant. Skinner comes to us from the UNC Center for Infectious Diseases but spent most of the past four years as an administrative assistant with the Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy. She earned her bachelor’s degree here at Carolina. |
Faculty Spotlight: Federico Innocenti, MD, PhD
Federico Innocenti is an associate professor in the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics and associate director for oncology research in the Institute for Pharmacogenomics and Individualized Therapy. He also holds appointments in both the UNC School of Medicine and the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Through his NIH-funded research program, Innocenti aims to discover effective strategies for individualizing therapy for cancer patients. His team is focusing on discovering the genetic factors that influence the effectiveness and toxicity of cancer chemotherapy by integrating clinical genomic investigation with functional evaluation of gene variation. One of Innocenti’s most notable achievements was clarifying the genetic basis of the severe neutropenia (a deficiency of a certain type of white blood cell) experienced by some cancer patients treated with the drug irinotecan. Because of his work, the FDA revised the label of irinotecan in 2005. Innocenti is a co-inventor of the FDA-approved UGT1A1 genetic test for patients treated with irinotecan.
Innocenti is the principal investigator of numerous pharmacogenetic studies within the Alliance of Clinical Trials in Oncology where he serves as the chair of the Gastrointestinal Solid Tumor Correlative Science Group. He is also the vice chair (and the incoming chair for 2012) of the Oncology Section at the American Society of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics.
After receiving his MD from the University of Pisa, Innocenti completed residencies in clinical pharmacology and oncology. He has a PhD in pharmacology, toxicology, and chemotherapy. He joined UNC in January 2011 after twelve years of research in cancer pharmacogenetics at the University of Chicago, where he directed the pharmacology course for the Pritzker School of Medicine for seven years. He is the author of more than eighty-five journal articles and book chapters and sits on the editorial board of Journal of Clinical Oncology, Pharmacogenetics and Genomics, Therapeutic Drug Monitoring, Current Drug Metabolism, and others. He is the only associate editor for Pharmacogenomics and one of the associate editors for Frontiers in Pharmacogenetics and Pharmacogenomics.
Staff Profile: Amy Sloane
Amy Sloane joined the School in June 2011 as assessment coordinator working with Mary Roth McClurg, PharmD, MHS, in the Office of Strategic Planning and Assessment. As coordinator, she manages the day-to-day operations of the office—including course evaluations; annual surveys; data collection, management, and reporting; and website development and maintenance—and serves as staff liaison to the Assessment Committee.
Before making the move to pharmacy, Sloane spent six years with the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. She joined public health as a social research specialist for the Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, where she managed two week-long courses each year and assisted with translating and disseminating evidence-based research interventions into best practices and processes for use by public-health practitioners. After two-and-a-half years, she moved to the Center for Public Health Preparedness as a training and curriculum specialist, designing and implementing face-to-face and distance-based training programs for local and state public-health practitioners. Before coming to UNC-Chapel Hill, Sloane did survey research for the Securities Industry Association and was a research specialist on a smoking-cessation program at the University of Arizona College of Public Health.
Sloane is currently enrolled in the MEd program in training and development at North Carolina State University and expects to graduate in December. She holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Washington University in St. Louis.
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