Teaching Methods

Dr. Buatois is a board certified pharmacotherapy specialist practicing in the area of inpatient internal medicine. She has a passion for experiential education and postgraduate training. She equips pharmacy students and residents with the critical thinking skills they need to be successful pharmacists in the future. Her scholarship focuses on pharmacist impact on the management of acute illness as well as the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Dr. Cline’s areas of focus include wellness, integrated course design, instructor development, and curricular operations. She has a passion for teaching and learning and strives to create meaningful learning experiences using evidence-based teaching practices and individualized student support for PharmD students, graduate students, and post-graduate trainees. Her scholarship also focus on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning related to wellness, integrated course design, and curricular operations.

Dr. Denton's teaching includes various pharmaceutical science laboratory and research survey-based courses along with previous experience in writing courses. His teaching philosophy is that advancing inquiry-based and universally designed teaching is essential to prepare innovative and well-rounded research teams capable of addressing complex challenges in pharmacy practice.

Dr. Denton's research group investigations include professional identity formation, teamwork development, inquiry-based learning, metacognitive coaching, healthcare disparity elucidation, course-based undergraduate research experiences, community-based teaching, information/research literacy, social annotation, education technology practices, and various projects advancing discipline-based education research and the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Dr. Denton’s primary service efforts include promoting undergraduate research, professional development in education research, and maintaining an equal opportunity environment for all learners through various committees and affiliation with the Michael V. Drake Institute for Teaching and Learning.

Dr. Downing’s professional interests include designing meaningful learning experiences that enhance a learner’s health and well-being. In the classroom, she evaluates the impact of using evidence-based instructional strategies during the course design process on college student well-being measures, such as safe medication practice behaviors and healthcare self-efficacy. Outside the classroom, Dr. Downing supports the design and development of prevention education resources that help teach safe medication practices across the lifespan.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a family of small nonprotein-coding RNAs that have emerged as important regulators in cardiac developmental and pathological processes. They are genomically encoded and are initially transcribed as part of much longer molecules that become processed into a mature ~22-nucleotide-long form. miRNAs are generally regarded as negative regulators of gene expression that inhibit translation and/or promote messenger RNA (mRNA) degradation by base-pairing to complementary sequences within protein-coding mRNA transcripts. Hundreds of human miRNA genes have been identified and bioinformatic analyses indicate that miRNAs might regulate the expression of more than a third of human protein-coding genes, highlighting the potential magnitude of their influence on gene expression. Given the increasingly important roles of miRNAs in heart development and function, the lab hypothesizes that aberrant regulation of miRNAs may play a role in mediating cardiovascular disease. Therefore, one major focus of Elton’s laboratory investigates miRNA expression and gene regulation in various cardiovascular diseases.

Dr. Legg’s interests include experiential education and interprofessional practice education. As the Director of Experiential Education, she is responsible for building strategic experiential partnerships and preceptor engagement programming as well as leading the experiential education program and team, with a special focus on APPE. She enjoys interacting with pharmacists in all practice settings to create unique APPE rotations for student pharmacists. Dr. Legg is passionate about interprofessional opportunities and is a member of the 2023 National Academies of Practice Interprofessional Group of the Year based on a high-quality simulation the group created including students from 10 different health professions collaborating to take care of simulated patients.

Dr. Matthews is passionate about developing innovative and effective teaching methods and measuring the impact of educational interventions through scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). His specific areas of interest within SoTL include interventions that promote metacognition and retention.

Dr. Mefford is interested in the use of active learning to promote student engagement with science and to foster deeper understanding of often controversial topics associated with drug use and addiction. She strives to instill good research techniques to help engrain learning as a lifelong process.

Dr. Newman is a pharmacologist with expertise in the neurobiology of substance use disorder (SUD) and Pharmacogenomics. In addition to developing courses and teaching in her areas of specialty in both the College’s Bachelor of Science in Pharmaceutical Sciences (BSPS) and the Doctor of Pharmacy programs, Dr. Newman leads the College of Pharmacy’s undergraduate programming, including the Bachelor of Science in Pharmaceutical Sciences (BSPS) program, the Pharmaceutical Science minor, and various General Education courses. In this role, she is actively involved with curricular development and implementation, program creation, and enhancement of the university student experience. Dr. Newman has focused her career on teaching and learning and is passionate about creatively enhancing the student experience to facilitate more student engagement and deeper, life-long learning. Dr. Newman has served as a Second-year Transformational Experience Program (STEP) mentor since 2018. Dr. Newman’s scholarly research efforts focus on evaluating how SUD is taught at the undergraduate and professional levels and on how understanding the neurobiology of SUD affects treatment and respect for individuals with SUD.