School of Pharmacy (SOP) faculty members are expected to engage in scholarship consistent with our mission and to expand the scientific knowledge associated with the practice of pharmacy and medicine. PCOM SOP advances biomedical, pharmaceutical and clinical research initiatives that address the evolving needs of patients and society.
We seek to expose students to many different aspects of pharmacy practice and the pharmaceutical sciences, including clinical and basic research. Students work closely with faculty to develop and support individual student growth and engagement in research. Research may be undertaken during the academic year, over the summer and as projects conducted as part of APPEs during the fourth professional year, as well as non-curricular work based opportunities. Non-curricular opportunities can be funded through the Federal Work Study (FWS) program for students with financial need, allowing them to earn money to help pay education expenses.
Central to the mission of the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences is academic and research training of students. PCOM students participate in research with faculty through the federal work-study program, as volunteers, through the Graduate Program tracks and APPE elective rotations.
Well-equipped laboratory space facilitates the research interests of the faculty and provides scholarship opportunities to students across diverse areas including autoimmune, cardiovascular, neuroscience and neurodegenerative diseases, cancer and the molecular basis for treatment, drug development and target identification, the use of natural products to fight cancer, obesity, hepatoregeneration, cardiovascular regulation and disease, biomedical imaging, biomarker identification and translational bioinformatics.
The focus of the Department of Pharmacy Practice is on creating, through research, and disseminating in the literature, scientific knowledge about the effective, safe, and economical use of medications. Within the department, practicing clinicians focus on evaluation of drug regimens and clinical outcomes of patients through partnerships with individual hospitals, hospital systems, and outpatient clinics. Administrative and social science faculty within the department utilizes extensive corporate and governmental databases to evaluate disease state, medication usage, hospitalizations and pharmacoeconomic considerations based on individual treatment regimens. Students have opportunity to work with departmental faculty on research projects, presenting results as well as manuscript production.
Part of the mission of the department is to educate and train students to become clinicians and enter the profession of pharmacy. To this end, faculty also engages in research of teaching, learning and education to improve pharmacy education in the classroom, teaching skills laboratories, and experiential rotations.
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