Cen Guo, a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, has been awarded the School’s Kathryne A. Brewington Graduate Student Research Award, which is given annually to the most outstanding doctoral student in the pharmaceutical sciences.
Under the guidance of Kim Brouwer, Pharm.D., Ph.D., Guo’s dissertation research focuses on hepatic transporters and pharmacokinetic modeling. Hepatic transporters are critical determinants of the disposition of drugs and endogenous compounds, which are those that originate from within the body.
Hepatic transporters can be affected by drugs, genetic variations and disease states, and Guo works to understand and predict those effects. Specifically, she is studying the effect of hepatic transporter modulation on the disposition of drugs and bile acids, which has important implications in drug efficacy and safety.
“I am very honored to be selected as the recipient of this prestigious award,” she said. “The Brewington award serves as an encouragement for graduate students to pursue service activities while conducting high quality research.”
Guo received the five-year Chancellor’s Fellowship from the UNC Royster Society of Fellows, which was awarded to one percent of graduate students admitted by UNC-Chapel Hill in 2013. She has published eight peer-reviewed manuscripts in the field of drug transport, metabolism and pharmacokinetic modeling, and she has served as a reviewer for academic papers.
Guo is a member of the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics and the Research Triangle Park Drug Metabolism Discussion Group, and she is actively involved in participating in or planning seminars and mentoring programs through the Royster Society.
Guo received her B.S. in pharmacy in 2010 and her M.S. in pharmacokinetics in 2013 from China Pharmaceutical University. She hopes to defend her dissertation by early 2018.
The Kathryne A. Brewington Graduate Student Research Award was created to honor the memory of Kathryne Brewington, who died in 1997 while pursuing her doctoral degree at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy.
The purpose of the award is to facilitate the research of an exceptional doctoral student in the Ph.D. in pharmaceutical sciences program. It consists of a plaque and a $1,500 research grant, which can be used to fund research, to travel to another research institution for the purpose of developing new research skills or to attend a national scientific meeting to present the results of the student’s dissertation research.