Community pharmacy resident Ashley Branham, PharmD, PY4 student Tsu-Hsuan “Sherry” Yang, and their faculty mentors have won Walmart Scholarships from the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy.
This marks the fourth consecutive year that members of the School have won Walmart Scholarships. The awards, which began in 2005, aim to strengthen the recipients’ skills and commitment to careers in academic pharmacy through their participation at the AACP Annual Meeting and Seminars. Each student-faculty pair will receive $1,000 to help cover registration and travel expenses for the AACP Annual Meeting and Seminars on July 10-14 in Seattle, Washington.
Branham, mentored by clinical associate professor Macary Weck Marciniak, PharmD, is the first resident in the School’s new PGY2 community pharmacy residency program with a focus in academia. The residency, which Marciniak helped establish in 2009, is the only one of its kind in the country. Branham is working at Moose Professional Pharmacy in Concord, North Carolina, where she is involved in developing clinical services such as immunization and medication therapy management. She has served as a clinical instructor at the School and as a preceptor for students on their community pharmacy advanced pharmacy practice experience. On the research front, Branham has received an American Pharmacists Association Foundation Incentive Grant to support a project titled “An Analysis of Economic Outcomes Following Pharmacist-Provided Medication Therapy Management Services.” At the APhA Annual Meeting and Exposition in March 2010, she made presentations about that research and another project that was based on her work at Moose with local physicians, titled “Developing a Medication Therapy Management Collaborative Practice.”
Yang has been actively researching the issue of medication disposal, working to increase awareness of the problem, and participating in drug take-back efforts around North Carolina. She published an article about medication disposal in the winter 2009 issue of North Carolina Pharmacist. She and her faculty mentor, clinical assistant professor Kelly Scolaro, PharmD, have another paper, titled “Raising Awareness of Medication Disposal in Professional Schools,” slated for publication in the March/April issue of the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association. In addition, Yang presented a poster of her work at the 2010 APhA Annual Meeting and Exposition.
The Walmart Scholarships are given to professional and graduate students, residents, and fellows. Candidates are evaluated based on their transcripts, statements of their career goals, and the faculty mentors’ descriptions of the students’ qualifications and capacity to succeed in academic pharmacy.