It Takes a Community
Our school is one of the very best in the country. That’s not just my opinion; it’s the opinion of pharmacy leaders across the country. U.S. News & World Report (USNWR) solicits the opinions of pharmacy leaders from every pharmacy school in the academy to develop their ranking. In their latest release last April, we are ranked 6th in the nation. Our reputation is based on a robust research portfolio and stellar student outcomes. Our PharmD students’ three-year average first-time pass rate for the NAPLEX, pharmacy’s licensure exam, is 94.6% — fourth best in the country. The NAPLEX is a six-hour standardized test designed to evaluate a graduate’s general practice knowledge.
As pharmacy gets more complex, pharmacy education and training must evolve to prepare students for the future of their profession. Residencies are a requirement for graduates seeking jobs in some of the most demanding practice environments. The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) organizes The Match, which connects graduates with pharmacy residency programs across the country. To successfully match with a residency, graduates interview with top pharmacy leaders who evaluate each candidate’s ability to think on their feet, work collaboratively, problem solve, and communicate effectively. This is a very different kind of test than the NAPLEX. This spring, 112 Badgers — the fourth most in the country — successfully matched with a PGY1 or PGY2 residency program through ASHP.
Faculty and staff excellence
Our faculty and staff are overachievers as well. Most recently, Associate Professor Quanyin Hu was recognized as this year’s winner of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) Emerging Leader Award. According to AAPS, this award recognizes scientists and pharmaceutical professionals who are early in their careers and have made a significant impact in promoting public health through their contributions to pharmaceutical sciences. AAPS regards awardees as future global leaders.
Our recruitment staff, led by Jeremy Altschafl, are doing an outstanding job recruiting students for our PharmD program. This year’s incoming class is 139 students with excellent academic and extracurricular accomplishments. This is a very important achievement by Jeremy’s team, since the number of applicants to pharmacy schools nationally has dropped precipitously in recent years and is still less than it was 20 years ago. Furthermore, there are more pharmacy schools today (142) than ever before making competition for outstanding applicants fierce.
Power of collaboration
Not only do we have great students, faculty, and staff, but we are housed in a highly productive and collaborative health sciences community on the UW–Madison campus. We are right across the street from UW Health, the Carbone Cancer Center, and the new American Family Children’s Hospital; and down the street from the William S. Middleton Memorial Veterans Hospital (one of the very best in the VA system), the Veterinary Medical School, the Chemistry Department, and the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. The graph below is a visual representation of the number of federal grants that our faculty and staff collaborate on with schools and colleges across campus. These collaborative projects provide an important way that our students get exposed to a wide range science and scientist with expertise beyond pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences.
A great example of School of Pharmacy scientists collaborating across campus and around the country is UW–Madison’s National Center for Quantitative Biology of Complex Systems, which received renewed funding by the National Institutes of Health this summer. Lingjun Li, professor of pharmaceutical sciences, serves as a co-investigator and leads one of the three major portions of the project. Work by the Li Research Group directly empowers four major projects focused on neuronal development, cancer biology, mitochondrial heterogeneity, and glycosylation-mediated signaling, while also providing critical quantitative capabilities that support the Center’s broader mission in metabolic disease, cardiovascular disease, precision medicine, and integrated multi-omics.
The School is also leveraging campus relationships to get up to speed with the rapid changes in artificial intelligence (AI). This summer, UW–Madison opened its first new college in over four decades: the College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence (CAI) housed in the newly constructed Morgridge Hall. The launch of CAI was supported with an investment of over $400 million from alumni, industry leaders, and other partners as well as a commitment by the university to hire over 50 new CAI faculty. The CAI will be a hub for AI teaching, research, and scholarship. Given the impact that AI will have on all parts of the university, a major mission of CAI will be to help educate UW students, faculty, and staff on the basics of AI, including its strengths, weaknesses, and threats when used recklessly or unethically. We at the School have been meeting with the CAI leadership to establish important new collaborations with their AI experts to help incorporate the principles of AI into our curriculum. Collaborations between CAI faculty with SoP faculty are also developing to help accelerate our research enterprise.
Badger network
Once a Badger, always a Badger. And that’s especially true for the School’s Board of Visitors, made up of alumni who have been very successful in a wide range of fields within pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences. One of our board members, Joel Jones (PharmD ’07), who is vice president of clinical and therapeutics informatics and chief safety officer at Epic Systems. Epic, based here in the Madison area, produces an electronic health record (EHR) product that is found in health systems worldwide. Joel’s focus is primarily around new models of care and leading agentic AI with Epic’s Agent Factory. Joel’s vision of how AI will be incorporated into Epic’s EHR can help us design didactic curricula that prepare our pharmacy students for how AI will be incorporated into the clinic workflows of the future.
So that’s why our school has such a great reputation. It’s the combined efforts of a community of curious, hard-working students, dedicated staff, collaborative faculty, and generous alumni all working together to help the next generation of Badgers reach their full potential as pharmacists and scientists.
On, Wisconsin!
Steven M. Swanson
Dean and Professor