Several faculty members from the College of Pharmacy made presentations at the annual meeting of the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) held in Grapevine, Texas earlier this week.

Dr. Leigh Ann Bynum and Dr. Angela Hagan were co-presenters for a session entitled “Curricular Approaches to Active Learning”, which demonstrated different ways in which active learning techniques have been incorporated into pharmacy curricula.  Dr. Bynum and Dr. Hagan focused on the use of patient simulation technology in the classroom.  Dr. Scott Weston moderated the session which included presentations from two other pharmacy schools.  Dr. Weston is the incoming Chair of the AACP Curriculum special interest group and was recently appointed to the Editorial Review Board for the AACP Center for the Advancement of Pharmacy Education (CAPE).

Dr. Hagan also joined with Dr. Hope Campbell to speak at a session on “Reviving the Meaning and Perceptions of Being a Minority Faculty Member”.  In addition, Drs. Hagan and Campbell presented a poster entitled “Where’s the Minority Representation? State of Affairs in Academic Pharmacy”.  Dr. Campbell is the incoming Chair of the AACP Minority Faculty special interest group.

Dr. Ashton Beggs presented a poster titled “Student Perceptions of Inter-Professional Collaboration through Geriatric Case Training”.  This poster was a report prepared by Dr. Beggs, who worked with faculty in the Meharry Consortium Geriatric Education Center, to produce a day long training session for students in nursing, social work, physical therapy, dietetics, medicine and pharmacy.  Dr. Beggs also made a poster presentation with Dr. Alisa Spinelli on “Student Preference for Traditional vs. Non-Traditional Presentation Modalities”.

Dr. Edgar Diaz-Cruz, assistant professor of Pharmacy, was recently published in the journal. Frontiers in Oncology, for research he and his colleagues conducted on human pancreatic cancer.   The study, entitled Human pancreatic cancer-associated stellate cells remain activated after in vivo chemoradiation, showed that human tumor-derived pancreatic stellate cells survive both in vivo chemo- and radiotherapy. The data supports the idea that stellate cells play an essential role in supporting and promoting pancreatic cancer and may lead to new treatments targeting the pancreatic tumor microenvironment.  The team included researchers from the National Cancer Informatics Program, the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, Georgetown University, the University of Texas, the German Research Center for Environmental Health, and ETH Zurich in Switzerland.

Dr. Condit Steil, professor of Pharmacy,  Dr. Mark Chirico, a former faculty member in the College of Pharmacy, and Dr. Richard Thompson from Lipscomb University have co-authored a manuscript accepted for print publication in August by Currents in Pharmacy Teaching and Learning.  The article describes the implementation and first two years of follow-up of a novel interprofessional program which includes the School of Medicine and the School of Nursing at Vanderbilt University, the Social Work Department at Tennessee State University, the College of Pharmacy at Lipscomb University, and the College of Pharmacy at Belmont University.  The study suggests positive benefits, as well as some areas for improvement, of interprofessional students working together in experiential settings and provides a format for other institutions to follow.  The article is available electronically by clicking here.