Board of Trustees to Share 2-Year Plan for Funding New Initiatives

In the past 9 months, the Board of Trustees (BOT) has received valuable input from individual members, PRNs, and stakeholders. The BOT is now prepared to begin funding over the next 2 years for new and updated initiatives addressing the Foundation’s expanded mission. The plan will first be shared with members attending the Annual Meeting in October. Programs will reflect the Foundation’s continued emphasis on supporting research and investigator development as well as broadening the emphasis to include supporting more ACCP members in scholarship and advanced practice.

Congratulations to 2019 Futures Grants Program Awardees

The ACCP Foundation Frontiers Fund is earmarked to support researchers, scholars, and practitioners and to promote research and scholarship to practitioners, trainees, and students. Through its Futures Grants program, the Foundation Board of Trustees is especially interested in supporting the development of research skills among student, trainee, and early-career ACCP members with a goal of establishing sustained interest and careers in pharmacy research.

This year, the ACCP Foundation received 37 applications for its mentored research funding program. Each application was reviewed by an expert panel according to the program’s core review criteria. The ACCP Foundation congratulates the 2019 Futures Grants program awardees. All award recipients will be recognized during the Awards and Recognition Ceremony on Sunday, October 27, during the ACCP Annual Meeting in New York City.

Junior Investigator Awards:

• Leo F. Buckley, Pharm.D., Brigham and Women’s Hospital – Precision Pharmacologic Inhibition of NLRP3 Inflammasome Activity in Experimental Uremic Cardiomyopathy. Mentor: Peter Libby, M.D.
• Razieh Kebriaei, M.Sc., Ph.D., Wayne State University – A Novel Approach for Combating Medical Device Associated Biofilm Infections of MRSA. Mentor: Michael Rybak, Pharm.D., MPH, Ph.D., FCCP, FIDP, FIDSA.

Student/Resident Awards:

• Andrew Jatis, Pharm.D. Candidate, University of Iowa College of Pharmacy – Exploration of Prohibitin-1 as a Novel Therapeutic in Glucose Homeostasis and Insulin Signaling. Mentor: Ethan Anderson, Ph.D.
• Lusi Zhang, MHI, Pharm.D. Candidate, University of Minnesota – Polygenic Risk for Cardiovascular Diseases, Cardiovascular Medication Burden and Cognitive Performance in Patients with Psychotic Disorders. Mentor: Jeffrey Bishop.

The ACCP Foundation Board of Trustees and staff would also like to express their sincere gratitude to the expert reviewers who served on the Junior Investigator and Student/Resident Award Review committees. Members of the Junior Investigator Award Review Committee were Erin Barreto, Philip Chung, Mariann Churchwell (chair), Alexander Flannery, Jeffrey Fong, Abir Kanaan, Craig Lee, Jeannine McCune, Ian McGrane, Pamela Moye-Dickerson, Keith Olsen, Kimberly Scarsi, Jason Schaefer, and Michael Ujhelyi. Members of the Student/Resident Award Review Committee were Paul Gubbins (chair), Kirollos Hanna, Jason Karnes, Qing Ma, Courtney Mospan, Emma Tillman, Adrian Wong, and Eric Wright.

FUTURES GRANTS TIMELINE CHANGES IN 2020

 

It’s not too late to enter a PRN or independent trivia team in the ACCP Foundation Trivia Challenge, which will take place during the Opening Reception of the ACCP Annual Meeting in New York City, Saturday, October 26, 2019, at 7:30 p.m. The Fundraiser Trivia Challenge is a simple fundraising competition that will end with a rousing game of pharmacy trivia. Teams of four will compete to answer questions about clinical scenarios, unusual medical equipment, other pharmacy topics, and potpourri.

Last year, the inaugural Trivia Challenge was swept by the Board of Regents team, winning top score honors and the distinction of the trivia team raising the most money. The Regents already have registered a team for 2020 (“The Boardinators”), so we’d like to encourage as much friendly competition as possible to take on the reigning champions.

 

Investigator Development

Mentored Research Investigator Training (MeRIT) Program

This one-of-a-kind training program is designed to help pharmacists develop the abilities necessary to conduct investigator-initiated research, either independently as a principal investigator or as an active co-investigator within a research team. Ideal candidates for the MeRIT Program are pharmacy faculty or practitioners with limited research experience who are:

• Committed to incorporating research into their professional careers;
• Interested in generating research themes or obtaining preliminary data for larger funding opportunities; and
• Aspiring to be active principal investigators or co-investigators within a research team.

MeRIT is a 2-year longitudinal program that uses a combination of live and virtual teaching and mentoring methods to provide trainees with the support and education they need throughout the research experience (i.e., from idea, proposal development, funding application, project completion, to presentation and publication). Be sure to visit the 2018 MeRIT participants’ completed research posters and the 2019 MeRIT participants’ research design posters during the Annual Meeting in New York City, Saturday, October 26, from 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. in the New York Hilton Midtown, Americas Hall I.

The application period for the 2020 MeRIT Program will open in November 2019, with letters of intent to attend due February 28, 2020, and full applications due March 31, 2020. The primer program will be held June 22–26, 2020, on the campus of the University of Kentucky College of Pharmacy in Lexington.

Focused Investigator Training (FIT) Program

The FIT flagship pharmacist investigator training program continues June 22–26, 2020, at the University of Kentucky College of Pharmacy in Lexington. If you are preparing to submit (or resubmit) a research proposal to the NIH or other major foundation/organization funding source, FIT should be on your agenda.

This 5-day intensive, hands-on program has a strong history of participant success, given that it pairs experienced and funded faculty mentors with investigator-participants. The program is geared to fine-tune R-type investigator-initiated proposals and K-type career development awards. The ideal applicant is a mid-career, fellowship-trained, tenure-track or research-focused pharmacist. The application period for the 2020 FIT Program will open in November 2019, with letters of intent to attend due February 28, 2020, and full applications due March 31, 2020.

Feedback from a past FIT participant:
The focused and protected time to work on my proposal and receive expert/critical feedback on my proposal were instrumental to my receiving funding, and I’ve not been able to reproduce the same experience outside the FIT Program.

More information on MeRIT and FIT will be available at the ACCP Foundation’s booth at the Annual Meeting in New York, or on the website here.