Associate Professor
Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology
Jacobs School of Medicine & Biomedical Sciences
Apoptosis and cell death; Cell growth, differentiation and development; Endocrinology; Gene Expression; Medical Education Research; Molecular genetics; Reproductive Endocrinology; Signal Transduction; Toxicology
My research and practice focus on developing, promoting, and evaluating effective means of pharmacology instruction at the undergraduate, graduate, professional, and interprofessional levels.
Developing a competency-based curriculum in pharmacology for students at all levels, I have headed teams to incorporate specific instructional methods into existing core courses that has, in effect, taken a sometimes-intimidating subject like pharmacology and presented it to students in manageable ways.
Studies of the effectiveness of these methods are conducted in collaboration with professional societies, including ASPET and its Division of Pharmacology Education. Specific instructional methods in the study include: patient case presentations by professional students utilizing rubric descriptors of performance quality and 360 feedback; Pharm Fridays throughout the second year medical curriculum incorporating review of national board-style questions; posting of organized and current lists of pertinent drugs in all Phase 1 course sequences; use of active participation clicker sessions with relevant board-style pharmacology questions; development of performance-based pharmacology questions within the multidisciplinary objective structured clinical exam (OSCE) taken by all DDS candidates; and video presentations demonstrating pertinent pharmacology topics such as procedural sedation, use of emergency drugs in the clinic, and safe and effective means for pain management with interviews of clinical experts. These and other instructional methods in the presentation of pharmacology are highly rated by students and proven effective by outcomes on standardized exams.
Since 2017, I have been co-director of the endocrine-reproductive biology module for second-year medical students. In 2021 and in 2024, I was nominated for the Seigel Award presented by medical students to recognize teaching excellence. As an ongoing means to improve pharmacology instruction, I coordinated the survey of pharmacology instruction in the medical curriculum, assessing adequacy of pharmacology learning objectives, utility of various instructional methods, and coverage of USMLE Step 1 pharmacology expectations. Stemming from this multi-year information gathering, I am currently co-director of the Pharmacology Curricular Thread that runs through the entire new-launched (2024) Well Beyond Curriculum. The role of the Pharmacology Curricular Thread is to build student knowledge in pharmacotherapeutics and to deeply enrich students’ understanding of medicine in today’s world. Prepared pharmacology presentations have been shared with and utilized by clerkship directors as part of the Pharmacology Curricular Thread.