In September, the College of Pharmacy became the first school in South Florida to offer a Ph.D. in pharmacy.
Students in the program will choose from three sequences: determinants of drug use, drug discovery and drug development. Students can expect to graduate within four and five and a half years of enrollment. Classes include pharamacoeconomics, biostatistics and graduate research.
“There’s a distinct shortage of pharmacy Ph.D.s both in academia and industry,” said Hugh M. McLean, Ph.D., associate dean for research and graduate education. “Especially in academia, there’s a shortage of faculty particularly in pharmaceutics. We are hoping we could alleviate that shortage of faculty and shortage of Ph.D. researchers in industry.”
The first graduating class has three people: Kenja Correa Nivar, Fernando Lopez and David Mastropietro.
Mastropietro, the only student enrolled in the drug discovery sequence, said, “I guess I’m concerned about not knowing what is ahead of me. I’m going down a road that nobody’s gone down before. I think that’s the biggest thing. But I think the school is really invested in what they’ve set up and they’re working to make it a good program.”
Mastropietro is a pharmacist but he is interested in research. He moved to South Florida two years ago and was looking for a school that offered a Ph.D., but could not find one. When he browsed NSU’s Web site he saw that the university did not offer it. He checked again two months later and was excited to see that the university added the program.
“So, I came down and asked for more information. The timing was just right,” he said.
The college received 20 applications and accepted six. It awarded scholarships to four students and they started in September, but one dropped out. McLean said he expects future classes to have seven students in each sequence.
The program was in the works since 2008, said McLean. But it launched this fall because McLean’s immediate predecessor died while working on the program.
“The focus of any Ph.D. program is research. Our graduates will be well-equipped individual researchers in their respective fields,” McLean said. “We expect them to significantly contribute to both academia and industry.”
Depending on what concen-tration students choose, they may select a specialty ranging from cardiovascular pharmacology and cancer pharma-cology to patients’ decision making and pharmacy marketing.
