March 19, 2012
Graduate students at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy will have their stipends increased nearly 20 percent over the next two years, raising the amount they receive from $23,000 per year to $27,500.
The stipend will grow over two years with $2,500 added in fall 2012 and $2,000 added in fall 2013. The increase will affect all doctoral candidates recruited directly into the graduate program in pharmaceutical sciences and will serve as the new base amount of support offered by the School. Graduate students receive stipends as compensation for teaching, research duties, or other comparable academic responsibilities.
“We have devoted an immense amount of effort to growing our research enterprise over the past decade, and we want to bring the best future pharmaceutical scientists in the nation and the world to North Carolina,” says Bob Blouin, PharmD, dean of the School and Vaughn and Nancy Bryson Distinguished Professor.
The School’s total research funding exceeds $27 million annually, and it ranks second among the nation’s pharmacy schools in funds received from the National Institutes of Health by faculty acting as principal investigators or as coprincipal investigators on grants. The close proximity of North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park and other research universities spurs collaboration and partnerships in academia and with industry. Research at the School has generated eleven spin-off companies in the past decade.
“The research and graduate education program here at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy provide an extraordinarly rich environment for graduate students,” says Alex Tropsha, PhD, associate dean for research. “The facilities, faculty, and funding we offer—which continue to grow at a rapid pace—ensure a world of opportunities for our students.”
Approximately ninety graduate students are currently enrolled across the entire School conducting cutting edge research in diverse areas that that mirror the four stages of the drug discovery and development cycle including drug discovery, preclinical and clinical development of therapeutic agents, optimum delivery of drug therapy, evaluation of health and therapeutic outcomes of novel drug therapies and technologies, as well as regulatory policies.
For more information, interested students should contact Roy Hawke, PharmD, PhD, assistant dean and director of graduate studies, at rhawke@email.unc.edu.