Public Health Teaching and Research in the Academy

Public Health Researchers Within the Pharmacy Academy

Many of those with whom we share faculty appointments conduct research that has made incredible and innumerable impacts upon the health of the public. Table 1 provides a listing of academic researchers, institutions, and areas of research emphasis that are directly tied to public health issues. Subsequent references list representative publications that highlight the work of these individuals. This list is significant for its global representation and range of research foci directly related to public health. This list is not meant to be complete — far from it. It is simply a very small representative sample of researchers, where they teach and research, and what research they are involved with in impacting public health. Their work should make us all collectively proud of them and should serve as encouragement for others to attempt to excel as well.

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Table 1.

Representative Examples of Public Health Research by Pharmacy Researchers in Academia

Some of these individuals reach people at a time when they are at the lowest ebb of their lives, homeless, sick, and despondent (Dr. John Conry). Others seek to awaken the collective consciences of those that manufacture, distribute, and market pharmaceuticals (Drs. Matt Perri and Stephen Schondelmeyer). There are those that seek to understand how to deliver health care to the homebound through interdisciplinary cooperative efforts (Dr. Tim Chen) and those living in isolated, rural areas of the United States (Dr. Tim Stratton) or South Africa (Professor Hazel Bradley). Many among our academia and globally seek to ensure tobacco cessation (Dr. Christine Bond) or health promotion teaching and research (Dr. Claire Anderson). The regulation and provision of pharmacy benefits have been addressed throughout the careers of stellar scholars working within regulatory bodies and academia (Dr. Weng-Foung Huang). Some seek the answers to the powerful grips and grasps of additions (Dr. Carlton Erickson). Throughout their careers in the pharmaceutical industry and academia, others have nobly sought to help develop classes of drugs (tetracyclines) and other antimicrobial agents that have saved countless lives (Dr. Lester Mitscher). There are those among us who have worked tirelessly and without subsequent acclaim to identify the scourge of counterfeit medications (Dr. Marvin Shepherd). Some have led excursions to the fertile jungles of South America to identify therapeutically active substances in efforts that would rival anything Dr. Indiana Jones factitiously attempted (Dr. Alice M. Clark). Some have identified naturally occurring substances to address and provide cures for the scourges of cancer (Dr. Gunda Georg).

The efforts highlighted here are noteworthy and worthy of our praise. Those who also conduct public health-related research in our academia are widely dispersed. This research, teaching, scholarship, and outreach is conducted across disciplines with colleagues and close associates in schools and colleges of law, dentistry, nursing, allied health, medicine, business, social work, public health, and education. The work impacting public health is never finished, expansive in scope, and provides stressors during incredibly challenging times for academia. This work always is important, yet is often accomplished with few resources—a fact that is stressed early and often in the curricula of schools and colleges of public health. This is not a hindrance but rather a reality that helps focus efforts and resources on the greater good.

More Is Needed From Many

The efforts by these who are our colleagues within divisions, departments, schools, and/or universities need to be joined by many more of us. In an academic era that demands more teamwork than ever before, with expectations of interdisciplinary cooperation, what better milieu of collaborative research exists beyond that of public health? There is much yet to be examined. Solutions need to be found for pesky problems. The most vulnerable segments of society are dependent upon our collective efforts and need our best work and collaboration. Public health is hard work and the results only intermittently rewarding, but lives and health are desperately dependent upon this. Let us share in the noble work of our colleagues in public health within our academy and beyond. There is so much more that we can and need to accomplish and there will never be a better time to do so.