A team of three Pharm.D. students at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy has been selected to receive two years of support through the Campus Y’s CUBE Social Innovations Challenge for their proposed social interactive phone app that will help health-care students learn, memorize and retain drug information.
Riley Kim, Steven Kiss and Patrick Kurunwune comprise one of 13 teams of social entrepreneurs selected for a two-year residency that a provides a number of interconnected benefits from the UNC Center for Social Justice and Social Innovation, including coworking space, $5,000 seed funding and access to a variety of mentorship and capacity-building workshops.
The project — called Monikos — is a smartphone app that contains the comprehensive information that health-care students must learn and provides a platform where fellow students and classmates can interact to help and challenge each other during their studies, according to the team’s proposal. Enhancing the initial learning and ultimate retention of basic drug properties will allow students to make more confident and accurate decisions when faced with complex medical problems, such as choosing optimal therapies or identifying harmful drug interactions before they occur, the team said.
“The Monikos application offers a unique solution to poor retention rates of critical, yet simple information,” Kim said. “Our innovation offers a socially interactive tool for learning essential information, along with a method for successfully using memory techniques to improve retention. Monikos will also incorporate a fun, social aspect into the learning by allowing users to engage with one another through study games and challenges.”
Users will have the option to study by learning the material with flashcards, testing their knowledge with a spell check, matching or developing a final exam that incorporates, true-false, fill in the blank and multiple-choice questions. Also, Monikos will incorporate a fun, social aspect to the learning by allowing user to engage with one another through study games and challenges. Users will have the ability to challenge one another to test each other’s drug knowledge through friendly competition and repetition
“On behalf of the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy and the Eshelman Institute for Innovation, I’d like to say how proud we are of our students and their continued motivation and determination to make a difference,” said Mary Roth McClurg, associate professor and associate director of the Eshelman Institute for Innovation. “We encourage our students to take risks, be bold and pursue creative solutions to problems.”
Kim has completed her first year as a pharmacy student at UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy. She graduated from Tufts University with a dual degree in economics and international relations and moved to New York City to work as an investment banker at an international investment fund. With a background in business and finance, Kim hopes to pursue a career in pharmaceutical industry after successfully completing her Pharm.D.
Kurunwune graduated from Duke University with a double major in psychology and biological anthropology and anatomy with a certificate in markets and management. He is has completed his first year as a Pharm.D. student and says he is interested in pursuing a career in hospital pharmacy administration.
Kiss attended the University of Michigan where he received a B.S. in biology. Upon graduating, he gained clinical research experience at the University of Michigan Medical School in the Department of Cardiovascular Pharmacology. He is currently a Pharm.D./M.B.A. dual-degree student at UNC and has most recently worked as a consultant for startup biotech companies in the RTP area. After completing his degrees at UNC, Kiss says he is planning to work in the pharmaceutical industry in finance or marketing.