The National Academy of Medicine (NAM) has selected Dr. Dima M. Qato as the 2018–2020 NAM Pharmacy Fellow. Fellows are chosen on the basis of their professional qualifications, reputations as scholars, professional accomplishments, and relevance of current field expertise to the work of NAM and the Health and Medicine Division of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Fellows collaborate with eminent researchers, policy experts, and clinicians from across the country during their 2-year fellowship. In addition, they help facilitate initiatives convened by the National Academies to provide nonpartisan, scientific, and evidence-based guidance to national, state, and local policy-makers; academic leaders; health care administrators; and the public.

Qato is a nationally recognized pharmacist and pharmacoepidemiologist currently on faculty in the Department of Pharmacy Systems, Outcomes, and Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Pharmacy. Qato’s research focuses on access and safe use of medications in vulnerable populations, including minorities, immigrants, and refugees, in the United States and abroad. She uses population-based methods to better understand the underlying mechanisms for the use, underuse, and unsafe use of medications; how these patterns may influence health outcomes and health disparities; and what can be done from a community and policy perspective to address these growing public health problems. Qato’s goal is to promote public accountability in ensuring access to, and safe use of, medications at the national, state, and local levels. To achieve this goal, Qato wants to incorporate the role of pharmacies and the concept of “essential medicines” in payment and regulatory decision-making into ongoing health care reform.

Established in 1970 under the charter of the National Academy of Sciences, NAM (formerly the Institute of Medicine or IOM) provides objective, evidence-based advice to policy-makers, health professionals, the private sector, and the public. The NAM Fellowship in Pharmacy program, initiated in 2012 with organizational support from ACCP and the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, enables talented, early-career health policy or health science clinicians and scholars to participate actively in the work of NAM and to further their careers as future leaders in the field. Qato is the fourth fellow to be selected for this fellowship, following ACCP members Samuel Johnson, Pharm.D., BCPS, FCCP, and Steven Smith, Pharm.D., MPH, BCPS, and the most recent NAM Pharmacy Fellow Jonathan Watanabe, Pharm.D., M.S., Ph.D., BCGP.