College of Pharmacy News

Andrea C. Gore, Ph.D., professor of pharmacology and toxicology and Vacek Chair in Pharmacology, recently earned an R35 RIVER grant award from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) for her lab’s research on endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) and their effect on the brain. The NIEHS, which is one of the centers in the National Institutes of Health (NIH), awarded a total of $6,823,672 for eight years.

Two of the college's distinguished faculty in the Division of Health Outcomes and Division of Pharmacy Practice were recommended for promotion by President Hartzell due to their outstanding accomplishments in research, outreach and education. Dr. Tish Moczygemba will assume the rank of professor and Dr. Kristin Janzen will become a clinical associate professor.

The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) has released its grant research funding awards for the upcoming year. All three awarded research projects at The University of Texas at Austin involve College of Pharmacy faculty.

The University of Texas at Austin College of Pharmacy moved up in several research funding categories, as reported in the newly-released rankings from the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP). The college rose to #8 nationally in total research funding during the 2019-2020 fiscal year, compared to #9 in 2018-2019.

Combining mobile health technology, or mHealth, and community outreach to improve the health outcomes of people experiencing homelessness is the target of a new study led by Division of Health Outcomes Associate Professor Leticia Moczygemba, Pharm.D., Ph.D., thanks to a five-year research grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Three researchers from the College of Pharmacy won an award from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) Foundation. Leticia R. Moczygemba, Pharm.D., Ph.D., Carolyn M. Brown, Ph.D. and Michael Johnsrud, Ph.D., R.Ph. were awarded $5,000 from the PhRMA Foundation for their proposal to advance racial and ethnic representation in value assessments.

Live subject testing results from the Williams Lab show that dry powder inhalation could be a potent and effective delivery method of the antiviral remdesivir to treat patients affected by COVID-19.

A team of researchers in the college, led by Robert O. (Bill) Williams III and Hugh D. Smyth, is investigating varying methods of drug delivery to repurpose existing drugs in order to treat and prevent serious COVID-19 virus symptoms in patients.

Pharmacology and Toxicology Professor Andrea C. Gore, Ph.D. recently received an impressive five-year RO1 grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the National Institutes for Health (NIH), for research to determine how PCBs cause dysfunctions in reproductive physiology and behavior.

College of Pharmacy Professor Karen M. Vasquez, Ph.D. recently collaborated on a research paper exploring the mechanisms involved in DNA structure-induced genetic instability in human disease. “Mechanisms of genetic instability caused by (CGG)n repeats in an experimental mammalian system” recently published in Nature, and includes co-authors Artem V. Kononenko, Thomas Ebersole, and Sergei M. Mirkin from Tufts University.