The School recognizes Daniel Ricci, Jeremy Barnes, and Nick Zetes for their lasting impact on student pharmacists
By Katie Ginder-Vogel
Behind every skilled pharmacist is a chain of preceptors who helped shape their path. For many practitioners, those early experiences with preceptors — the pharmacists who guide PharmD students during their clinical rotations — become defining moments that influence not only their careers, but also their own approach to precepting in the future.
Each year, the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Pharmacy celebrates preceptors whose commitment to teaching and mentoring has made a lasting impact on student pharmacists. Fourth-year PharmD students nominate a preceptor from their final-year clinical rotations for the Larry Boh Preceptor Excellence Award, while students in their earlier years recognize preceptors from their Introductory Pharmacy Practice Experiences (IPPEs). In 2025, those students selected Daniel Ricci (MS ’18) for the IPPE Preceptor Excellence Award.
“Our preceptors are the bridges between classroom learning and real-world practice,” says Professor Mara Kieser, assistant dean of experiential education. “Even early in the curriculum, preceptors like Daniel go the extra mile to help our learners build confidence, apply their knowledge, and see what pharmacists can do for their communities.”
“Even early in the curriculum, preceptors like Daniel go the extra mile to help our learners build confidence, apply their knowledge, see what pharmacists can do for their communities.”
–Mara Kieser
This year, two preceptors are being honored with the School’s Sustained Preceptor Excellence Award, honoring preceptors who have been nominated at least five times. The honorees, Jeremiah Barnes and Nick Zetes (PharmD ’10), have demonstrated years of dedication to guiding and inspiring future pharmacists.
“This award gives us a mechanism to recognize the consistently outstanding work our preceptors are doing,” says Kieser. “Student feedback shows the tremendous impact Jeremy and Nick have had, and we’re deeply grateful for their commitment.”
Daniel Ricci (MS ’18)
IPPE Preceptor Excellence
“I’m totally humbled,” says Ricci, the manager of Forward Pharmacy Cambridge, a small community 20 miles east of Madison. “I feel really fortunate because I, myself, had incredible preceptors during pharmacy school, and it’s been a goal of mine to recreate that environment for my students to keep the cycle going. It’s validating to know that students are having a positive experience at my site.”
Forward Pharmacy is an independent pharmacy network with additional locations in Cottage Grove, McFarland, Monona, Deerfield, and Columbus. Ricci has about 3,000 active patients.
“I’m pretty sure that exceeds the community population,” says Ricci. “We are the quintessential small-town pharmacy. I know most of my patients by name and their stories, to the degree they’re willing to share. That’s what I live for.”
Ricci says that the most rewarding thing about his practice is that he sees customers at different stages of their lives — whether it’s new parents grappling with their baby’s first prescription or older adults struggling with increasingly complex health issues.
“I get to walk with them through that whole journey, and the frequency with which I connect with them doesn’t occur anywhere else in the healthcare system,” he says. “I help patients solve problems with their medications and collaborate with them on how to take them and fit them into their lives. In community pharmacy, we get to help patients navigate the healthcare system.”
Ricci was a graduate student in the School of Pharmacy’s Health Services Research in Pharmacy program when the COVID-19 pandemic nudged his path in a new direction. He had earned his master’s degree and was writing his dissertation proposal for his PhD, while working at a pharmacy on the side. When the pandemic ramped up, he ran the pharmacy’s COVID-19 testing program, until he hit an inflection point where he felt there were only two choices: complete his PhD program, or run the testing program full time.
“That was an incredibly difficult time, and pharmacists and healthcare workers all over absolutely rose to the occasion, knowing what they must do,” he says. Ricci left his PhD program to run the testing program from October until December 2020, when the attention turned to vaccinations. “I helped our pharmacy build a very substantial testing program, and then we pivoted to vaccines and built a very substantial vaccination program.”
“I feel really fortunate because I, myself, had incredible preceptors during pharmacy school, and it’s been a goal of mine to recreate that environment for my students to keep the cycle going.”
–Dan Ricci
The pharmacists extended the program into the community via mobile vaccination clinics and secured a grant to provide testing services to approximately 10,000 Madison-area students to facilitate the return to in-person instruction.
“I’m proud of the effort I put forward, and I’m thankful I had the opportunity,” Ricci says. “I was uniquely situated as a pharmacist who didn’t have to be a pharmacist right then, because I was in grad school.”
As the vaccination surge fell, Ricci picked up shifts at Forward Pharmacy and was offered the manager position. Although his PhD is officially on hold, he leverages the skills he developed in graduate school every day.
“In grad school, you learn experimental design and statistics and how to analyze and gather data to answer questions,” he says. “I find myself often reaching toward primary literature to address patient questions.”
Ricci spends his summers thinking about the new services he wants to bring to his community before the busy vaccination season begins in the fall. For example, he’s exploring a partnership with Fort HealthCare to provide Medicare Chronic Care Management to eligible patients who are at risk for complications from their existing health conditions. He envisions pharmacists coaching patients monthly to achieve their health goals.
“We have all these health systems adjacent to rural communities, and we have pharmacists within all those communities,” Ricci says. “We could shift some of the primary care burden to the pharmacist.”
Ricci enthusiastically includes his students in every aspect of his day-to-day experience.
“I think that community pharmacy is a wonderful setting for teaching because it provides you with an endless array of discussion topics, given the varied things you do throughout each day,” he says. “I bring my students along for the ride and get them talking and thinking about what they’re doing, why they’re making certain choices, and when pieces of knowledge are relevant or not.”
Ricci says his primary motivation for precepting is the experience he had during pharmacy school.
“It’s also extremely motivating when you have students who are excited to learn,” he says. “I’ve been fortunate to have one student after another interested in my practice setting, my approach to pharmacy, and my perspective.”
Jeremy Barnes
Sustained Preceptor Excellence
The Clement J. Zablocki VA Medical Center in Milwaukee is a teaching hospital, so teaching and learning is part of the culture. By interacting with students constantly, precepting pharmacists, like Barnes, stay on top of the latest knowledge, which benefits patient care.
“Everyone we work with has this component of teaching or precepting as part of their job, which creates the type of culture I want to work in,” says Barnes, an internal medicine clinical pharmacy specialist who has been precepting for seven years. “Asking questions is encouraged, and continuing to improve is expected. Teaching new pharmacists is really enjoyable.”
Barnes, who was honored with the Larry Boh Award for Precepting Excellence in 2023, says his approach has stayed fairly consistent, with an emphasis on objective feedback.
“We’re a required rotation, so I keep it broad: You might apply this skill here, or this component of your foundational knowledge here, and this is how you could apply it elsewhere,” he says. “I continue to center criteria-based feedback by outlining my expectations for a learning activity or experience before I deliver any degree of objective feedback about it.”
Barnes encourages students to develop daily routines that can sustain them on challenging days.
“I tell them, ‘I care about how you go about your day, because on your worst day, your habits will sustain you,’” Barnes says. “The steps you are used to going through will keep you successful.”
Barnes says students like the aspects of pharmacy practice they can lean into at the hospital — talking to patients as part of care transitions, applying medication knowledge, and engaging with providers.
“We’ve had several students come out of this rotation and say they could see themselves pursuing this and they like what they see in hospital practice,” Barnes says. “I’m very happy because we’ve had all these great trainees who make precepting a great experience. That gives me extra energy to keep being my best.”
Nick Zetes (PharmD ’10)
Sustained Preceptor Excellence
“I’ve been surrounded by great preceptors, starting in 2001 as a student,” says Zetes. His preceptors during an ambulatory rotation at UW Health inspired him to stay there for his entire career and give back to the profession in the same way.
Today, as outpatient pharmacy coordinator at the American Family Children’s Hospital, Zetes focuses on skills that translate to almost any pharmacy position students might ultimately have and apply to any patient population, like dosage form considerations, calculations, lab monitoring, thinking through patient cases, and knowing how to use resources efficiently to answer questions.
“I like to sit down in the beginning and talk to them about what their goals are for the block, what they feel their strengths are, and where they feel like they can improve,” says Zetes, who won the Larry Boh Award for Precepting Excellence in 2020. “I aim to keep challenging them throughout the block.”
Zetes always takes in students’ feedback, recognizing that pharmacy is becoming increasingly complex and acknowledging that students may feel stressed or apprehensive at times.
“I emphasize to them that even though I’ve been practicing for a while, I still walk into situations that rattle me, and this is how I deal with it, or this is how I continue to learn to deal with it by observing others, by talking through it, and by thinking about situations ahead of time. I think what resonates is that they see it as a team journey, not just doing six weeks on their own and moving on.”
Zetes precepts as a way to give back and says his most satisfying moments are seeing students see clinical concepts in action.
“I love it the most when I’m working with a student, and they’re actively engaged,” he says. “We talk about concepts they learned in school, and then they can actually see it firsthand in practice. Seeing that click with a student is really rewarding from a teaching standpoint.”
Zetes is grateful for the colleagues who support him in practice and precepting.
“I want to thank the people I work with as well,” he says. “I work with great pharmacists, great technicians, and excellent students, and they keep me interested and engaged.”
