Funding Priorities

The VCU School of Pharmacy is committed to becoming the nation's leading program in the 21st century by taking advantage of the unique resources of Virginia Commonwealth University and its collaborative environment and a tradition of strong support for higher education in Virginia.

Our School of Pharmacy will lead the way in advancing the profession of pharmacy, setting the direction for pharmaceutical care, education and research. We will have formidable influence in shaping drug policy and pharmaceutical practice in the state of Virginia and on the national level.

The Mission

The mission of VCU SOP is to educate, create knowledge and provide service to our students, the pharmacy profession and the public by:

• Building a culture of scholarship that fosters excellence in pharmacy education, research and service;
• Creating curricula and experiences that prepare graduates at the professional level to function as essential health care providers;
• Creating graduate curricula and experiences that produce scientists that are innovators and leaders within their discipline;
• Recruiting and retaining quality faculty, staff and students;
• Establishing partnerships, collaborations and strategic alliances to advance our mission; and,
• Securing the proper environment for success through resource development

The mission of the Development Office is to secure private resources toward the realization of the School’s vision by:

• Partnering with school’s leadership to articulate and market the vision of the school
• Engaging individuals, foundations and corporations to explore and create opportunities for private philanthropy
• Securing private gifts from individuals, foundations and corporations

Funding Priorities

For the VCU School of Pharmacy to continue to be recognized nationally and internationally as one of the premier Schools of Pharmacy for research, teaching and service, private gifts to the school must increase to fuel us forward. Philanthropic gifts to the School of Pharmacy play a critical role in our ability to become the best. The School of Pharmacy has many opportunities for philanthropy at different levels of support.

From the $300 annual fund contribution to the $1 million gift to endow a faculty chair or support research, all private gifts are appreciated and serve to advance the school toward its mission. While the following is not a comprehensive list of gift opportunities, it does highlight the areas of most critical importance.

Scholarships

An investment in today’s pharmacy students is an investment in the future of the pharmacy profession. Securing additional endowed scholarship support for students is among the highest priorities of the School. The cost to educate our third and fourth year Doctor of Pharmacy students, including tuition and fees, books and supplies and living expenses, is now over $11,000 per year for Virginia residents and over $18,600 for out of state students. The support scholarships provide can take many forms, but all serve to inspire those who receive award in another’s name.

Scholarships can be merit-based, need-based or a combination of both. They can reward someone pursuing a certain practice area, someone exhibiting community leadership or someone from a specific geographic region. Donors establish the criteria for their fund which is kept on file permanently. Scholarship funds can be named and provide a nice recognition in perpetuity for the donor in that the scholarship takes on a new life with each student beneficiary.

Henry Addington’s motivation for creating a scholarship in the VCU School of Pharmacy was simple- to keep independent pharmacy alive and healthy. Not an easy feat in today’s highly competitive market and with today’s financially strained students. “Without the financial relief from scholarships, students are already tens of thousands of dollars in debt before they begin practicing pharmacy,” Addington notes. “They certainly don’t have a way to put down the money needed to open an independent pharmacy. I thought this scholarship was one way of giving them a chance.

There’s a common misconception that independent pharmacy is becoming a thing of the past; that it’s a lost field. I just don’t believe that,” says Addington, who has served as president and vice president for more than 23 independent pharmacies in Virginia over his nearly 55 year career. Recipients of Addington’s scholarship must demonstrate an intention to practice in an independent pharmacy in order to qualify.

“I grew up in a pharmacy and always intended to pursue independent pharmacy,” says Amy Zeigler, the 2005 Addington Scholarship recipient. “When I graduate, I will work with my father in his pharmacy in Coeburn, Virginia, then one day I’ll take over as owner.

Ziegler explains how critical the need is for immediate financial assistance: “As fourth-year pharmacy students, we’re required to pay summer tuition in addition to fall and spring tuition and work clerkships at a minimum of 40 hours per week during the year. It is quite difficult to work those 40 hours for free and then try to squeeze another 20 to 25 hours a week at a part-time job to help pay the bills.”

Funding Requirements

Named scholarships are encouraged at a minimum endowed level of $10,000. Below this amount donors may direct support to any established scholarship. School of Pharmacy endowed funds are managed by the MCV Foundation under a growth oriented investment policy: with spending capped at 5% interest.

Scholarships available to Pharm.D. students include:

• Henry Addington Academy of Independent Pharmacy Scholarship
• Lindsay W. and Laura Butler Scholarship
• William S. Cooper Scholarship
• Class of 1953 Scholarship
• Class of 1955 Scholarship
• Sheldon W. Fantl Scholarship
• Russell H. Fiske, Sr. Scholarship
• William W. and Patsy S. Gray Scholarship
• Linda Nixon Harvey Scholarship
• John W. Hasty and Kelly Hasty Kale Scholarship
• Richard T. Jacobs Memorial Scholarship
• K-Mart Pharmacy for Excellence in Community Pharmacy
• David D. Marshall Memorial Scholarship
• Nick Nicholas Memorial Scholarship
• Charles T. Rector and Thomas W. Rorrer, Jr. Graduate Scholarship
• Rite Aid Scholarship
• M. Bruce Rose Memorial Scholarship
• Samuel and Gilbert Rosenthal Endowed Scholarship
• George E. and Carries C. Schlosser Endowed Scholarship
• W. Roy Smith Scholarship in School of Pharmacy
• Carolyn Coleman Stone Scholarship
• Ukrops Pharmacy Scholarship
• Glenn B. Updike, Sr. Scholarship
• Warren Weaver Scholarship
• C. Eugene White Scholarship
• Edward E. Willey Scholarship Award
• Graduate Fellowships and Awards

The School of Pharmacy has a critical need for Graduate Scholarships. VCU is far behind other state universities in its ability to draw upon endowed scholarships to support graduate students and yet these higher cost students are essential to the schools ability to maintain its reputation as a cutting edge research institution. Scholarship funded graduate students are able to provide the essential trial and error phase of research that governmental and corporately funded students and faculty are restricted from undertaking.

Named Professorships

The number of endowed professorships speaks to the financial strength of an institution. Such support has the ability to attract and retain those who are preeminent teachers and clinicians, and it can augment the research of a top scientist. Named Professorships provide perhaps the greatest opportunity to honor an individual in perpetuity as they are remembered not only by the award, but by the work accomplished under its auspices.

E. Claiborne Robins Professor

Peter Byron, Ph.D.
Chairman, Department of Pharmaceutics

An extraordinary visionary and philanthropist, the late E. Claiborne Robins transformed his family’s small apothecary into the multi-million dollar pharmaceutical enterprise, A.H. Robins Company. Robins perhaps is best known as a benefactor to his alma mater, the University of Richmond, where his name adorns the business school and sporting arena. But Robins also created a significant legacy on the MCV Campus. A 1933 MCV pharmacy graduate, Robins and his late wife, Lora, endowed a distinguished professorship in 1987 to ensure excellence in pharmacy education and innovation in pharmaceutical research. Long after his death, Robins’ legacy lives on.

Professor Peter Byron is a man of many faces—a pharmacist, an immunologist, an engineer and physicist of sorts, a British turned American citizen. He is VCU’s pharmaceutics department chair who has built the world’s best academic aerosol research team. His finesse at attracting external research funding has won his department more than $10 million in grants and contracts over the last 15 years. But above all, Byron is an academic scientist, whose primary mission is to create, educate and serve. From developing optimal ways to get drugs into a patient’s lungs to discovering less environmentally harmful alternatives, Byron has devoted much of his career to creating new and better drug inhalation devices. In fact, Byron holds a number of patents on vastly improved aerosol inhalers that are widely used today. “The problem with traditional inhalers,” Byron says, “is that only 10 to 30 percent of a medication dose is making it to a patient’s lungs.” But through his latest major collaboration with the pharmaceutical industry, a multi-million dollar grant from Chrysalis Technologies, Byron is investigating a novel inhaler device that condenses medication into the smallest aerosol form yet to be discovered—small enough to accomplish complete lung penetration. But even more important, Byron takes every step of groundbreaking research with VCU students by his side. “I always encourage students to be creative, to challenge conventional wisdom and existing hypotheses, not to do ‘me too’ science,” he says. “With a constant emphasis on independent thinking,” says former graduate student John Sun, PhD ’95, “Dr. Byron planted a seed of innovation in my own research activities.” Sun now holds two international patents of his own. Many of Byron’s peers consider him the world’s leading voice for respiratory drug delivery systems. As chairman of the United States Pharmacopoeia Aerosols Expert Committee, Byron is active in regulatory policies in the U.S., Europe and other parts of the world. His international Respiratory Drug Delivery Conference, sponsored since 1988 by the VCU Department of Pharmaceutics, is widely considered the field’s premiere symposium. International standing aside, Byron says what he is most proud of are his students. “My former students have proven by virtue of theirown accomplishments that they can innovate. That’s the real reason we faculty are here after all, to make our students independent, to help them build enough confidence to fly on their own.”

Gifts Creating Gifts

Through its eminent scholars program, the Commonwealth of Virginia has provided universities additional incentive to create endowed professorships. Each biennium, the commonwealth budgets dollars to award to institutions that established endowed professorships. These state dollars match a percentage of the interest earned by such endowments, thus multiplying the value of a donor’s gift.

Support for Research

Extraordinary science is taking place on the MCV campus, and in particular within the School of Pharmacy. The School of Pharmacy is home to some of the leading research scientists and clinicians in the world.

Much of today’s groundbreaking research takes place in the R. Blackwell Smith Building, as well as the Virginia Biotechnology Research Park’s Institute for Structural Biology and Drug Discovery, a testament to the importance of interdisciplinary research. The advancement of scientific knowledge through research plays in integral part in preparing students for careers in pharmacy. Students working closely with faculty of the School have an active role in developing new drugs, drug delivery systems, clinical drug therapy and pharmacy and health care systems.

To ensure that present and future scholars can continue the School’s distinguished tradition of excellence in pharmaceutical research, the School of Pharmacy seeks additional funding. Gifts supporting research are essential in the quest for new discoveries that will improve the human condition.

Technology

In 2001 the School of Pharmacy launched is Student Lap Top Initiative which requires all students to purchase a laptop upon entry in the program. Funding is required to support students that are financially challenged by this new requirement and to support the continued technological development of pharmacy classrooms and faculty teaching techniques.

Center for the Advancement of Pharmacy Practice

Pharmacy is a dynamic and changing field. Pharmacy practice research is an essential component of the School’s mission for excellence in research and in service to practicing pharmacists. The objectives of the Center for the Advancement of Pharmacy Practice are:

• To clarify the role of pharmacist in health care delivery
• To identify key issues facing pharmacy practice that interfere with pharmacists’ ability to fulfill their roles
• To disseminate pharmacy practice research results and to assist in the translation of research findings into practice change

The implementation of a Center for the Advancement of Pharmacy Practice to support research and scholarship between pharmacy practice and education will cost $250,000.