BlouInsight, July 2008

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BlouInsight, July 2008

July 2008

 

School     Faculty     Spotlight     Staff

Many of you have heard a lot about the Educational Renaissance, one of the central elements of the School’s strategic plan. I think this is the perfect time to tell you all more about it. This month, Pam Joyner, Adam Persky, Gary Pollack, and I presented the ideas that comprise the Educational Renaissance during a ninety-minute symposium at AACP’s annual meeting. The presentation is based on a paper we published in the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education.

An important part of the Educational Renaissance is to move much of the transfer of basic information out of the classroom and have students take charge of mastering foundational content themselves. Thus far, the technology components of the Educational Renaissance have attracted the most attention. (These are the online tools we have developed for Adam Persky’s pharmacokinetics course and Rick Hansen’s pharmacy-management class.) However the principles of the Educational Renaissance are much more basic. Classroom time with faculty is precious and shouldn’t be spent in the rote memorization of facts even though imparting such information is vital to the education process.

Here are just a few examples of how our faculty is applying the principles of the Educational Renaissance to their teaching.

  • Amanda Corbett, Jo Ellen Rodgers, and Dennis Williams have repackaged their traditional lecture materials and made them available to students via Breeze in the form of narrated slide shows.
  • Sue Blalock created a Survivor-style game in her class: the student who “survives” was exempted from the final exam.
  • Bob Dupuis and Adam Persky have put students into groups during their spring pharmacokinetics class and asked them to solve problems as a team using information they gather outside of the classroom.

Be sure to look for the quarterly Time-Out for Teaching newsletter, a collaborative efforts of the Office of the Curriculum and Assessment and the Center for the Educational Renaissance and Instructional Innovation.

School

  • Howard McLeod, Russ Mumper, Dhiren Thakker, Alex Tropsha, and I—along with Marty Deberardinis of our Board of Visitors and other University officials—visited Singapore on June 7 through 12. We visited the National University of Singapore and the Agency for Technology, Research, and Science to discussion opportunities for collaboration in research and graduate education.

    We learned a great deal about a number of collaborative opportunities in research and in graduate and professional education. The School will continue to explore potential relationships. Additionally, I represented the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy and signed a renewal of our memorandum of agreement related to the U.S.-Thai Consortium for the Development of Pharmacy Education in Thailand. The signing took place in Madision, Wisconsin, and included the following U.S. pharmacy schools along with UNC: Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland-Baltimore, Minnesota, Ohio State, Purdue, Rutgers, UT-Austin, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin.
  • The North Carolina Health Careers Access Program has recognized the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy with the Cecil G. Sheps Leadership Award for the School’s efforts to increase the diversity of its student population and the health-care workforce. The award recognizes individuals or entities that have proactively sought out and implemented strategies to increase underrepresented minorities in a health science discipline or who have worked in partnership with NC-HCAP to support its mission and activities.
  • Shelby Abbott-Lunsford, Carrie Johnston, and Warren Ray have moved to suite 017 in Beard Hall. Human Resources’s former home, suite 025 in Beard, is now occupied by Barbara Dearry, Sherri Moore, and John Zhu. Stefanie Ferreri has moved to 115B Beard in PPEE’s suite, and Carla White-Harris is now in 100R in the Office of the Dean. Jena Ivey has moved to 115-H, and Ralph Raasch is now in 115-F. Adam Persky is in 109G, and Kim Deloatch is in 109F. The staff of the business office will be moving to newly opened room 016 in Beard Hall.

  • The restrooms on the second and third floor of Beard Hall are being renovated. We expect the work to be completed by August 15.

Faculty

scott singleton

 

I'm pleased to announce that Scott Singleton has agreed to serve as the School's new director of graduate studies, succeeding Tony Hickey, who has served so well in that capacity. The director oversees the School's graduate-degree programs in the pharmaceutical sciences and is our representative to the Graduate School. Scott will assume the role of chair of the Graduate Education Committee. I'd like to offer my sincere thanks to Tony for all that he has done in this capacity and congratulate Scott on this new and very important role.
   

koval

Earlier I shared some examples of instructional innovation at the School Here is another. Peter Koval, PharmD, recently returned from England where he met with pharmacy faculty and professionals from Keele University, University of Nottingham, University of London, and the National Health Service. The trip culminated with a meeting of pharmacy educators involved with a Second Life consortium of ten pharmacy schools from around the world. The ten schools were meeting to discuss the development of Pharmatopia in Second Life. This project hopes to share efforts from all ten schools in the virtual education of pharmacy students. Support from the John Payne fellowship funded the trips.

   

cho

Moo Cho, PhD, has received a grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute worth more than $1.5 million over five years to support his proposal, “Systemic Delivery of CpG Oligonucleotides.” Cho hopes to find a way to encourage the body’s immune system to attack and destroy tumors and minimize the need for chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery in the treatment of cancer.
   

ives

Timothy Ives, PharmD, MPH, has received a grant from the Department of Health & Human Services for a study on using clinical pharmacist practitioners to improve care. The grant, titled “A Study to Assess the Impact of a Primary Care Practice Model Utilizing Clinical Pharmacist Practitioners (CPP) to Improve the Care of Medicare-Eligible Populations in North Carolina,” is worth $95,305.

   
 

Michael Jay, PhD, has joined us from the University of Kentucky as a professor in the Division of Molecular Pharmaceutics. Jay has a major contract with the NIH to study and develop treatments to be used in radiation emergencies, such as after the detonation of a dirty bomb.
   
 

Macary Weck Marciniak, PharmD, returns to Carolina as clinical associate professor in the Division of Pharmacy Practice and Experiential Education. She graduated from the School in 2000. She comes to us from the Albany College of Pharmacy, where she was an associate professor of pharmacy practice. She has also been a practicing pharmacist for the past seven years.

   

 

I’d like to recognize Sue Blalock, PhD; Stefanie Ferreri, PharmD; and Mary Roth, PharmD, for the attention garnered by their recent paper in the American Journal of Geriatric Pharmacotherapy. A list of drugs that can increase the risk of falls in people sixty-five and older generated discussion by the health bloggers of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times.

blalock     ferreri     roth

 

Spotlight on: K. H. Lee

I want to call attention this month to the astonishing record of research and scholarship of K. H. Lee, PhD. The Pharmacy Foundation of North Carolina recently established an endowed professorship honoring Dr. Lee.

Dr. Lee is one of the world’s leading medicinal chemists. He joined the School in 1970 and has received continuous funding from the National Institutes of Health since 1971. His longest continually running grant, “Plant Antitumor Agents,” began in 1975 and is still ongoing. He is a Kenan Professor of Medicinal Chemistry, one of our most well-funded faculty members, and a prolific publisher of scientific papers.

Recently, Dr. Lee has drawn national attention for his work in developing PA-457, a new HIV drug whose main compound comes from a Taiwanese herb and is also found in the bark of North American birch trees. The drug has been receiving promising results in Phase II clinical trials and would represent a new class of HIV therapy if it reaches market.

Lee’s Natural Products Research Laboratories have generated worldwide interest and collaborations through their investigation of bioactive compounds in plants—often plants and herbs used in traditional Chinese medicine—as the starting point for discovering new and more effective drugs. The NPRL has received more than forty U.S. patents. The labs have discovered more than 2,000 novel bioactive natural products and analogs, which are used as new leads to develop pharmaceutical products. A hundred of those have been chosen by the National Cancer Institute for evaluation.

Staff

I want to once again offer my congratulations to Dama Keck, winner of this year’s Staff Award for Excellence. Dama goes above and beyond as the School’s registrar. In many ways, she is the face of the School to our PharmD students and their families. She is truly deserving of this honor.

Let me also note that Geri Middleton has achieved ten years of state service, and Tammy Havener, Pam Jackson, and Teji Rakhra-Burris all—like me—now have five years of service under their belts.

Finally, welcome to Susan Hanna who joins DPET as a research associate in Bill Zamboni’s lab.