Where were you born and where did you go to high school? 

Fredericksburg, Virginia.  My dad, Jim Burch, was a Marine in Officer Candidate School at Quantico.  I went to Lincoln East High, home of the Spartans.   

Where did you complete your undergraduate requirements for pharmacy school?  

University of Nebraska-Lincoln 

What is your favorite memory from pharmacy school? 

I worked at University Hospital’s central pharmacy. We invented a game called “Stump The PharmD” as we put away drugs returned in unit dose carts.  P1s played tablet/capsule ID, and as we learned more as P2s and P3s, we’d ask harder questions: routes of elimination, dosing, interactions, indications.  

Since I worked at UHospital, I knew staff pharmacist Keith Madison.  He had developed a specialized knowledge base relative to parenteral nutrition.  (This is 1978 or so-it was brand new therapy.)  He learned enough to be invited to give the lecture on PN in our therapeutics course.  He was invited to give a 50 minute lecture and had prepared 100 slides. After going WAY over time, he wrapped up by saying “Listen, TPN is a neat thing to get involved in. It’s clinical-fluid management and metabolism is part of every admission. It’s some fancy sterile compounding. It’s got med error potential galore. The components cost a fortune so there’s a lot of administrative attention to this therapy. Every hospital needs a pharmacist expert on this. Don’t think “It’s nutrition and it belongs to dietitians”. There’s plenty for pharmacists to own with this new treatment." That conclusion completely refocused my point of view. I ultimately was boarded in nutrition support pharmacy.  

Describe your career path since you graduated. 

All pediatrics. Residency at LeBonheur Children’s in Memphis.  First clinical practice/faculty position at the University of Michigan.  Returned to Memphis to help

establish a home TPN program, promoted and spent 10 years in the clinical/administration hybrid role popular at the time. 

After marriage and babies, we elected to relocate somewhere closer to family, and chose St. Louis.  Mercy Hospital St. Louis needed someone to improve drug therapy and pharmacy service in neonatal intensive care.  

We brought the pharmacy program from the 1960s to up-to-the-minute pharmacy services and improved clinical practices in nutrition, pain management, lung injury prevention, and neonatal opioid withdrawal.  Mercy’s chief pharmacy officer asked me to help implement many of those things more widely.  I wrapped things up by getting EHR<>infusion device interoperability established in the 30+ Mercy hospitals, 7 of which provide NICU care, and two are structured with children’s hospitals within adult focused hospital. Some places omit pediatric services from using that technology.  It’s not an insurmountable challenge.  We did it.   

Please list any honors or recognitions you have received during your career. 



The Mercy Kids board of directors recognized a couple of years of effort toward improving care of newborns whose parents refuse for their child to get phytonadione to prevent vitamin K deficiency bleeding. After talking to many young parents and finding out what people were worrying about, I was able to get many of those newborns protected.  Add in discussions with doulas and I had enough experience to write a 15 minute video lesson on how to talk to new parents about this topic.  That lesson was so well received that it was made required content for over 1200 obstetric and pediatric co-workers in Mercy. Our work ended up on the front page of the Sunday Post-Dispatch.

I was invited to give the address to newly installed Rho Chi members at St. Louis College of Pharmacy. I wrote and gave a terrific speech that wove concepts about neonatal opioid withdrawal into lessons on life as a pharmacist. Jokes on them- I was not tapped for Rho Chi as a student. 

One lunch time chat, we compared our coworkers to characters on M*A*S*H.  Eventually it came out that: "Everybody knows you are our Hawkeye.” 

If you could send a brief message to all of the people who donate to the UNMC College of Pharmacy, what would you say?

Have some fun whenever you can. (“Stump the PharmD”).   

Find a topic where you can be the expert (Keith Madison and TPN) 

Listen for those compliments that aren’t necessarily a plaque on the wall. (Hawkeye) 

Don't let pharmacy school experiences (grades/teachers/rotations) that didn't go perfectly dictate your career path. (Rho Chi absence from my CV? Didn't make much difference in my ultimate success.) 

Who was your PI?

Uday B. Kompella, PhD

What your project area was here? 

I worked on lung delivery of budesonide and its efficacy in a tumor model. I also identified angiogenesis target (VEGF) and transporter (MRP) related mechanisms in lung tumor cell culture models, among other projects related to drug delivery and transport mechanistics.

Describe your career path since you graduated.  

I'm currently the Global Vice President of Regulatory CMC at Astellas Pharma, and prior to this role, I was in Senior/Executive leadership roles at Merck and Pfizer. Prior to

my transition to Regulatory CMC leadership roles, I supported Pharmaceutical CMC Development activities at Sanofi and GSK. In these roles, I have consistently strived to drive progressive regulatory strategies, CMC policy, and advocacy engagement via PhRMA & ICH expert working groups. 

I also regularly contributed my expertise and leadership to AAPS and other leading scientific societies (DIA) including programming efforts. I have served as an Associate Editor for the AAPS Open Journal and as a member of the AAPS Regulatory Sciences (RS) Executive Leadership Team. I have also worked as the Chair of the AAPS Regulatory Sciences Section and was the recipient of several AAPS recognitions. Before that, I received my Master’s and a Bachelor’s in pharmacy from Andhra University in India.

I am married to Kavitha and have two kids. Kavitha Bandi, also a UNMC Alumni, completed her PhD (Pharmaceutical Sciences) in 2004, and is currently employed with CSL Behring leading the regulatory activities for complex biologics and gene therapy product portfolio. In my spare time, I enjoy outdoor activities, mentoring the younger generation, travel as a family across the globe, and support cultural activities. 

Please list any honors or recognitions you have received during your career. 

Several posters and publications, including AAPS Outstanding Graduate Research Award; and Norman & Bernice Outstanding Graduate Research Award in Cancer Research. This past year I was elevated to Fellow status in AAPS.