In what has become an annual tradition, University of Florida College of Pharmacy trainees collected multiple awards at the 2019 American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, or ASCPT, Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.
For the fourth consecutive year, the college led the nation in Presidential Trainee Award winners. UF trainees secured five of the 17 awards this year, which are given annually to the top scoring abstracts submitted by clinical pharmacologists in training. Since 2016, UF has won 20 of the 94 ASCPT Presidential Trainee Awards.
UF’s award recipients in 2019 included:
- Nihal El Rouby, Pharm.D., Ph.D., a postdoctoral associate in the department of pharmacotherapy and translational research
- Mohamed H. Shahin, Ph.D., a former postdoctoral associate in the department of pharmacotherapy and translational research
- Sonal Singh, Ph.D., a postdoctoral associate in the department of pharmacotherapy and translational research
- My Tran, P.S.M., a second-year Pharm.D. student at the Orlando campus
- Guang Yang, M.S., a graduate student in the department of pharmacotherapy and translational research
This is Shahin’s fifth and Singh’s third ASCPT Presidential Trainee Award. El Rouby, Tran and Yang are first-time winners.
Brian Cicali, M.S., a graduate student in the department of pharmaceutics, collaborated with his mentor Stephan Schmidt, Ph.D., F.C.P., an associate professor of pharmaceutics, and Daniel Kirouac, a senior principal scientist at Applied BioMath, to author an award-winning publication in the ASCPT-flagship journal Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics: Pharmacometrics and Systems Pharmacology. The trio was recognized with the journal’s best paper award during the meeting’s opening reception. Cicali, Schmidt and Kirouac studied the feasibility of establishing a repository for 18 quantitative systems pharmacology models published in the journal. Due to the diversity of software platforms, file formats and functionality, the authors found such a resource to be premature. In the paper, they offered ideas to enable model sharing moving forward and created a work group through ASCPT to implement the best practices.
UF College of Pharmacy trainees also won multiple poster awards at the meeting. Cicali and Tanaya Vaidya, M.S., a graduate student in the department of pharmaceutics, took top honors for their posters in the quantitative systems pharmacology session. Cicali’s poster featured research from his award-winning paper. Meanwhile, Yang won a top poster award at the pharmacogenomics research network session.
Lakshmi Manasa S. Chekka, Pharm.D., a graduate student in the department of pharmacotherapy and translational research, also received a travel grant to attend the ASCPT Annual Meeting. Her research focused on hypertension pharmacogenetics and pharmacoepigenetics.