Partnering with university leadership to advance our mission

By Deanna L. Kroetz, PhD, BS Pharm '85, dean and professor at The Ohio State University College of Pharmacy

It's hard to believe that we are already through summer semester! It was nice to have more time for strategic thinking and being able to jump-start a few new initiatives before the bustle of another academic year.

At the end of spring semester, Ohio State President Ted Carter stopped by as part of his listening tour of the university. We had an hour to showcase our academic and research missions and then a half-hour one-on-one with me. 

President Carter surprised Professor Maria Coyle's first-year PharmD class as they were finishing a team-based learning exercise. He and the students discussed the choice of a statin for a young patient with hyperlipidemia, before more general queries about hometowns and prior education. He took a moment to tell the class how much he valued the pharmacist's input on the medical team that provided him care during his time in the Navy and the critical role of the pharmacist. It was evident that the class left energized to finish the last month of studies before summer. President Carter also stopped by the pharmacy skills laboratory and consultation suite and saw students practicing immunizations with Dr. Colleen Dula.

To highlight the college's research mission, we toured the medicinal chemistry and high-throughput screening cores in the Comprehensive Cancer Center Drug Discovery Shared Resource housed in the college. President Carter heard about the exciting work being led by Drs. Blake Peterson, Chad Bennett and Meng Wu. He was very impressed by the state-of-the-art robotics and imaging systems in the phenotyping core and wanted to hear about the impact of these cores on drug discovery efforts within the college and the campus more broadly. We also highlighted the work of postdoctoral fellows and graduate and undergraduate students working side-by-side in the Experimental Cancer Pharmacology Lab, under the guidance of Drs. Sharyn Baker, Alex Sparreboom, Shuiying Hu and Eric Eisenman. Again, President Carter seemed eager to engage with the students and hear about their journeys to Ohio State and a research career. 

While we showed off a lot of remodeled laboratory and classroom space, I also took the opportunity to highlight the aging infrastructure in Parks Hall and the conditions of some of the original laboratory spaces. This nicely dovetailed with his acknowledgement a few days earlier in his State of the University presentation that nearly 50% of the buildings on the Columbus campus are 50 years old or older. Parks Hall opened in 1967. In my one-on-one meeting with President Carter, I explained the need for more modern research space, citing personal examples of challenges of doing research in my Parks Hall lab. 

President Carter expressed interest in my ideas around expanding drug discovery and development research in the college, the increasing need for computational and data analytic approaches across all pharmaceutical sciences disciplines, and the opportunities for clinical and implementation science research through partnerships with the medical center and the cooperative extension service, among others. We also discussed the pharmacy profession and the need to train clinicians who can practice in underserved rural and urban populations. I was energized by our conversation and felt that President Carter will be a fantastic partner in our efforts to advance the profession of pharmacy, the research caliber of the college and our national and international recognition as a leader in pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences. 

We are in the final phase of strategic planning and I anticipate sharing a public-facing report in the fall. I am excited to engage with our stakeholders to accomplish our college priorities, and I look forward to discussing ways we can partner soon.