College of Pharmacy News

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.

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.

Professor Rueben Gonzales of the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for distinguished contributions to the field of alcohol research.

Bill Williams was named the 2017 Inventor of the Year by the university’s Office of Technology Commercialization.