Orientation Begins for the PharmD Class of 2026, Monday, August 15, USC Health Sciences Campus, 7 am - 4 pm.

Moving Targets 2022: The World of Code, Thursday, August 18, organized by AAPS-USC. For more information: http://www.movingtargets.la.

Convocation, Thursday, August 18. University Park Campus, Alumni Park. 8:30 - 10:30 am.

White Coat Ceremony for the PharmD Class of 2026, Friday, August 19, Broad Lawn, Health Sciences Campus. 2 pm.

Fall 2022 School-Wide Town Hall Meeting, Thursday, October 27, PSC 112, 3:30 pm.

1st Annual QSAD Golf Tournament, Monday, November 7, All Day. Mission Viejo Country Club. All proceeds support scholarships.

Vassilios Papadopoulos, DPharm, PhD, DSc (hon) has been asked by university leadership to serve as interim dean of the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. 

Daryl Davies, PhD has been awarded a new $1.3 million five-year training grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The grant will create a new interdisciplinary program at USC, Rising STARS (Scientific Training in Alcohol Research and other Substances), designed to enhance diversity in the next generation of addiction scientists. Rising STARS is a partnership of USC-Institute for Addiction Science with Cal State LA and Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science (CDU).

Maryann Wu, EdD, Ying Wang, PharmD, and Ian Haworth, PhD have been selected to receive a one-year $50,000 intramural research award for their project, “Artificial Intelligence for Design of Optimal Pathways for Success in Pharmacy School: AI-SiPS."

P. Baykal, N. Beerenwinkel and S. Mangul, "Reproducibility of Bioinformatics Tools," in 2022 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops (IPDPSW), Lyon, France, 2022 pp. 216-216.

Kanter, G. P., Parikh, R. B., Fisch, M. J., Debono, D., Bekelman, J., Xu, Y., Schauder, S., Sylwestrzak, G., Barron, J. J., Cobb, R., Qato, D. M., & Jacobson, M. (2022). Trends in Medically Integrated Dispensing Among Oncology Practices. JCO oncology practice, OP2200136. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1200/OP.22.00136

Trish, E., Kaiser, K. M., Celestin, J., & Joyce, G. (2022). Reforming the Medicare Part D Benefit Design: Financial Implications for Beneficiaries, Private Plans, Drug Manufacturers, and the Federal Government. Journal of health politics, policy and law, 10041233. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1215/03616878-10041233

Lin, E., Ly, B., Duffy, E., & Trish, E. (2022). Medicare Advantage Plans Pay Large Markups To Consolidated Dialysis Organizations. Health affairs (Project Hope), 41(8), 1107–1116. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2021.02009

Dana Goldman, PhD co-authored an opinion piece in STAT about economic incentives to recruit more diverse participants in clinical trials. The authors served on a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine committee that published a report detailing the economic costs and other adverse impacts of low diversity in clinical trials.

USC pharmacy student Gizelle Mendoza was featured in several Associated Press photos taken while she was working at a pop-up monkeypox vaccination site in West Hollywood on Wednesday, August 3. The photos ran in Oregon Public Broadcasting, Omaha World-Herald, West Virginia News and numerous other publications nationwide.

Dima Qato, PharmD, MPH, PhD was quoted in WBEZ Chicago about pharmacy deserts in Chicago's south and west sides. She was also quoted in CBS News about her work studying contraceptive access in L.A. County.

John Romley, PhD was quoted in St. Louis Post-Dispatch about the largest health systems recovering from pandemic-related cancellations of lucrative procedures.

Erin Trish, PhD was quoted in a Schaeffer Center release about new USC analysis finding that Medicare Advantage plans are paying big markups for dialysis.

The following faculty members are among those who presented at the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) Pharmacy Education 2022 in Grapevine, Texas, July 23-27:

Serghei Mangul, PhD presented several talks at the 30th Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology 2022 (ISMB 2022) including "Rigorous benchmarking of T cell receptor repertoire profiling methods for cancer RNA sequencing," "Cultivating a data-driven computational culture within biomedical institutions by empowering graduate students with code-based data science skills," and "The systematic assessment of completeness of public metadata accompanying omics studies," July 10-14, Madison, Wisconsin. Ram Ayyala, Dottie Yu, Yu Ning Huang and Aditya Sarkar, all members of the Mangul Lab, also presented posters and talks at ISMB 2022.

Patrick Tabon, PharmD, APh, BCPS, BCGP, BCACP presented and moderated the “Healthy Aging Series: Tips on How to be Part of the Healthcare Team” in collaboration with Ashley Halle, OTD, OTR/L from the USC Chan Division of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy, and Theresa Sivers-Teixeira, MSPA, PA-C from the Keck Department of Family Medicine and Geriatrics on August 1st at the USC Emeriti Center. 

Patrick Tabon, PharmD, APh, BCPS, BCGP, BCACP served as a facilitator for “Leader Development Day” hosted by the California Pharmacists Association (CPhA) on August 6th via Zoom. 

Fred Weissman, PharmD, JD recently had a publication in the Journal of Contemporary Pharmacy Practice (Vol. 70. No. 2, 2022 - pages 9-12) entitled "Avoiding Common Legal Issues in Pharmacy Practice: Signing for Drug Deliveries, Overfilling Prescription Stock Bottles, Filling Out of State and Foreign Prescriptions." He is also in the last stages of finishing his third book, "California Pharmacy Law In Review," hopefully to be published before the beginning of 2023. Although he retired in June 2022, he is teaching pharmacy law courses in three pharmacy schools (Chapman, Ketchum and West Coast) during the fall 2022 semester and serves as a certified Superior Court mediator on Wednesdays and Thursdays at three courts (Chatsworth Court, Van Nuys Court and Dependency Court in Monterey Park). He is staying busy and very much enjoying these retirement activities.

SUMMER RESEARCH: Third-year PharmD student Nathaniel Chard, a Dean's Summer PharmD research fellow, presented "Comparability of Autism Outcome Measures" at the 2022 Summer Research Programs Presentation Day, hosted by the Office of Research on Thursday, August 4.

If you have upcoming events, publications, presentations or other projects to include, please email [email protected] so they can be highlighted in a timely fashion.