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Pharmacy faculty ranks among nation's most productive
By ELLEN GOLDBAUM
Contributing Editor
The School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences ranks fourth in the U.S. in National Institutes of Health research funding per Ph.D. faculty member, according to the latest report on pharmacy faculty from the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP).
The AACP is the national organization that represents pharmaceutical education and educators.
The organization ranked funding to Ph.D. faculty at the nation's 64 schools of pharmacy with active research programs.
According to the AACP report for 2002-03, individual faculty members with Ph.D.s at UB's School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences were awarded a total of $2.54 million in grants.
Individual faculty averaged grant awards of $194,916.
With a total of 13 full-time Ph.D. faculty members, the UB School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences is among the smallest schools of pharmacy in the U.S. Many schools have at least twice as many Ph.D.-level faculty, said Wayne K. Anderson, professor and dean of the school.
"We are significantly smaller than the programs that we're benchmarking against," he added. "But on a per-faculty basis, we're doing very, very well. Our faculty members are very efficient in what they do."
The three schools that ranked higher in the survey were those at the University of Colorado, University of Washington and University of California at San Francisco.
Faculty in the UB Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences conduct innovative pharmacokinetic, pharmacodynamic and pharmacogenomic studies. It is the home department of the scientists who first developed the science of pharmacodynamics—described as the interface where pharmacology meets physiology—that has changed fundamentally how new drugs are evaluated and approved.
Faculty in the Department of Pharmacy Practice conduct research ranging from pre-clinical, laboratory experiments to Phase I-IV drug development and post-approval clinical protocols. Innovative drug assays, pharmacogenomics and pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic modeling contribute to the development and implementation of novel clinical trials.
The School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences also is among the first in the nation to introduce courses and programs in such emerging fields as pharmacogenomics, where drug treatments are tailored to an individual's genetic makeup, and pharmacometrics, which fuses pharmacologic studies with computational and statistical methods of data analysis.