I felt like the conglomeration of intellectual challenges being faced here and the kind of smart people you interact with would make me raise my game. To play with these guys, you have to pick up your game a bit. I think that challenge was really interesting to me.

— Scott Singleton, PhD
Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products

There’re lots of great research programs going on on campus, and it’s still all on one campus physically, so it’s easy to interact with people here. It’s a really good mix of high-level science and a pleasant atmosphere for doing science. Those two don’t always go together. When you have high-level science, sometimes it makes it so competitive that it’s unpleasant to be in that atmosphere. It’s more cooperative, more collaborative here.

— Andrew Lee, PhD
Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products

The nice thing about working in the HIV area at UNC is we do have an AIDS research center and we do have funded cores. We have everything from the basic science all the way to behavioral and outcomes, large database-type work. It’s a very collaborative atmosphere, which is one of the reasons I came here. After I interviewed both here [at the School of Pharmacy] and with the School of Medicine, I realized that there was multidisciplinary translational research occurring here, and that was not happening at any of the other universities that I had interviewed at. Obviously, that’s certainly the way of the future in terms of the NIH roadmap, and UNC has already been doing this for a number of years. No one is in silos. Everyone is very collaborative and interested in making your research better.

— Angela Kashuba, PharmD
Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics

We are very fortunate here in the School in that both Dean Blouin and our former dean, Bill Campbell, have been very strong advocates of faculty mentoring. There are so many pressures on our faculty that if there’s anything we can do to help and also to give our young faculty a competitive advantage in this very difficult funding period that we’re in, then we’re better off. It was with that notion in mind that Bill Campbell devised the mentoring program. ... It’s been a wonderful program for me to be a part of. There are things in life that have downsides along with the upsides, but this one is all up.

— Harold Kohn, PhD, talking about the Bill and Karen Campbell Faculty Mentoring Program, which he directs
Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products

Many pharmacy graduates out there are impacting their physician colleagues, their nursing colleagues, their radiology colleagues, and others on a regular basis. They’re helping them make better decisions because of their skills, so it’s no surprise that the School is doing the same thing.

— Howard McLeod, PharmD
Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics
Director, UNC Institute for Pharmacogenomics and Individualized Therapy

I religiously believe in collaborations, and both of these grants are of a collaborative nature. My scientific life is impossible without collaborating with extraordinary bright people who have either similar or complementary research interests to mine — computer scientists on one side, biologists and pharmacologists on the other.

— Alex Tropsha, PhD, talking about the two NIH Roadmap grants he received
Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products (division chair)