Bruce and Barbara Moden

Bruce, past owner of five pharmacies in Western New York, has spent his five-decades-plus career as a consummate community pharmacist. In the early days, he filled prescriptions in between swings of a mallet to knock down the wall of a pharmacy that he was remodeling himself. The couple also raised daughters, four in all, one of whom also is a graduate of UB Pharmacy and has continued the tradition of running an independent pharmacy by co-owning Larwood Pharmacy in East Aurora.

And Barbara also was involved in pharmacy: she worked at two of the independent pharmacies owned by Bruce while also serving as an active member of the ladies Auxiliary of PAWNY (Pharmacists Association of Western New York).

But the image of Moden as a small-town pharmacist ends there.

He is well known at the university, having served UB as president and treasurer of the pharmacy school’s alumni association and as chair of the pharmacy school’s Campaign for UB: Generation to Generation committee, which raised its target of $12 million three years ahead of schedule. The school ultimately raised $18.6 million by the conclusion of the UB campaign.

Moden also is known as an activist in his profession who served as president of the local pharmaceutical association and state pharmaceutical society. For 10 years, he was the New York state community representative to the meetings of the United States Pharmacopeia (USP), a non–governmental, official public standards-setting authority for prescription and over-the-counter medicines and other healthcare products manufactured or sold in the United States.

And he ran for a seat on the New York State Assembly and has testified on behalf of pharmacists before the Federal Trade Commission. All of this while keeping busy in many church and community activities and serving on the Blue Cross Blue Shield Pharmacy Advisory Committee in the 1970s.

Though modest by nature, Moden recently appeared in the alumni magazine, UB Today, to explain the vanity plate on his car, PHARMR, which represents his dual professions: as a pharmacist and co-owner of a small regional chain of community pharmacies, and as a farmer who has spent “several years growing tomatoes and potatoes on our 65-acre farm, as well as helping in my father-in-law’s business of growing 10,000 tulips and hyacinths for the Buffalo-area Easter trade.”

Moden also appears in a pharmacy school video produced in 2009, telling viewers that he gives to UB and the school because “my mother always used to say, you know, charity begins at home.“

He adds, “You know, if you look at University at Buffalo School of Pharmacy, it is kind of home.”