Note: this story was updated September 28, 2020.

ACCP members Alex Isaacs and Kyle Burghardt were selected by the 2020 ACCP Awards Committee to receive the College’s prestigious 2020 New Educator and New Investigator awards, respectively. Isaacs and Burghardt will each be recognized during the 2020 ACCP Annual Meeting.

Isaacs

The ACCP New Educator Award recognizes and honors a new educator for outstanding contributions to the discipline of teaching and to the education of health care practitioners. The awardee must have been a Full Member of ACCP at the time of nomination and a member at any level for a minimum of 3 years; in addition, the awardee must have completed his or her terminal training or degree less than 6 years previously. Alex N. Isaacs, Pharm.D., BCPS, is a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Pharmacy Practice at the Purdue University College of Pharmacy and adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine. He has also practiced as a clinical pharmacy specialist in internal medicine, where he contributed to the education of pharmacy and medical students and residents. He has been the program director for the Indiana Pharmacy Teaching Certificate Program for the past 3 years. Isaacs received his Pharm.D. degree from the Butler University College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences and currently attends Purdue University Global as a candidate for an M.S. degree in educational psychology.

At Purdue University, he has been recognized as an exceptional educator who consistently exceeds departmental teaching benchmarks and contributes to the professional development of pharmacy students and residents. Purdue University College of Pharmacy Professor Alan Zillich wrote in his letter of nomination:

Alex has contributed to the academy through his emphasis on the scholarship of teaching and learning. With his passion for teaching, he has sought to evaluate and disseminate best teaching practices for both student pharmacists and pharmacy residents. Alex has collaborated with internal and external colleagues to implement and evaluate educational research. He has received support from three internal programs to support educational research. His overall research efforts have resulted in 19 peer-reviewed journal articles and 31 poster presentations at professional organizations, with 58% and 61% of these, respectively, focusing on the scholarship of teaching and learning. In addition to his contributions as an educational researcher, he has served as a reviewer for numerous peer-reviewed journals, including Pharmacotherapy and the Journal of the American College of Clinical Pharmacy. He has also reviewed abstracts for professional organizations, including for ACCP Virtual and Annual Meetings. Through his continued quest to enhance the educational experience for student pharmacists and residents within his institutions and within the academy, he will continue to promote and evaluate best teaching practices through the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Isaacs has received the Teaching and Learning Innovation Award from the Purdue University College of Pharmacy. In 2016, he received the Indiana Distinguished Young Pharmacist Award from the Indiana Pharmacists Association, and in 2019, he was a Walmart Scholars Program mentor for the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy. Isaacs has published his research in peer-reviewed publications, including the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, Currents in Pharmacy Teaching and Learning, The Clinical Teacher, the Mental Health Clinician, and the Journal of Pharmacy Practice.

Burghardt

The New Investigator Award recognizes an ACCP member who has made a significant impact on an aspect of clinical pharmaceutical science. The awardee must have been a member of ACCP for more than 3 years, must have completed his or her terminal training or degree less than 6 years previously, and must have a research program with a substantial publication record that includes a programmatic theme or an especially noteworthy single publication. Kyle Burghardt, Pharm.D., is an assistant professor of pharmacy science at the Eugene Applebaum College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences at Wayne State University. He received his Pharm.D. degree with distinction from the University of Michigan and completed a 3-year research fellowship at the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy, Department of Clinical, Social and Administrative Sciences, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His research focus is in psychopharmacology and pharmacogenetics, and he has received over $1 million in grant funding. He is conducting two ongoing NIH-funded grants studying mechanisms of antipsychotic medication–induced insulin resistance.

At the time of his nomination, Burghardt had published more than 30 papers in peer-reviewed literature, including first-author publications in high-impact journals such as Pharmacotherapy, the Journal of Psychiatric Research, and the International Journal of Genomics. Vicki Ellingrod, Pharm.D., FCCP, John Gideon Searle Professor of Clinical and Translational Pharmacy at the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy, commented on Burghardt’s qualifications for the New Investigator Award in her letter of support:

The line of research that Dr. Burghardt has decided to undertake is highly novel. As his initial investigations focused on a peripheral epigenetic analysis (as peripheral blood samples were readily available), his transition to independence has led him to directly investigate skeletal muscle. His research program combines epigenetics with the field of proteomics by looking in an important insulin-sensitive organ, the skeletal muscle, to address a significant gap in knowledge for antipsychotic-induced insulin resistance. This line of investigation is critical for those of us within the neuropsychopharmacology field, as we still do not understand the mechanism of antipsychotic-induced insulin resistance and use of these medications seems to be growing at an alarming rate. Furthermore, Kyle’s work will have a much broader impact within the field of diabetes, in general, as he has been using the extreme of antipsychotic-associated insulin resistance as a drug-induced model of diabetes. His efforts have identified a novel gene, and he has begun testing his hypotheses related to this discovery through an innovative, yet feasible, trial design. Work he currently has ongoing (and has recently obtained NIH support for) uses a 1-week, randomized, placebo-controlled trial in healthy subjects with olanzapine. By using a healthy subject cohort, he will be able to parse out the antipsychotic-specific metabolic effects independent of confounding factors that we know co-occur in psychiatric disease.

Jeffrey Bishop, Pharm.D., M.S., FCCP, BCPP, associate professor in the Department of Experimental and Clinical Pharmacology at the University of Minnesota College of Pharmacy, added in his letter of nomination:

Kyle is unique as he brings a wealth of equally balanced basic and clinical research experience from his 3 years of a postdoctoral fellowship. The quality of his work is exemplified by his substantial publication record, grants, and awards. He continues to develop research skills, and his career path for this development is clear and realistic and will have significant impact on the field of psychopharmacology and clinical pharmacy research. He has had great success as a new faculty member obtaining NIH, foundation, and local grants at a time when funding has been tight. This speaks to the quality of his work as well as the strategic positioning of what he plans to do, both of which are essential factors in determining the sustainability of one’s research program. He has over 30 peer-reviewed publications including a number of excellent contributions in both neuroscience and endocrinology journals. Additionally, the citation trends of his manuscripts highlight that a number of these contributions are getting a lot of positive attention.

Burghardt has collaborated extensively with other researchers on a national and international level and has received awards for his research from the College of Psychiatric and Neurologic Pharmacists and the American Society of Clinical Psychopharmacology. His work investigating the mechanisms of insulin resistance using skeletal muscle samples from patients receiving antipsychotics is described as innovative and may lead to the development of new therapeutic targets.

Members of the 2020 ACCP Awards Committee were Mary Amato (chair), Kristi Kelley (vice chair), Ty Kiser (secretary), Jacquelyn Bainbridge, Melody Berg, Kelly Caudle, Alexandre Chan, Lisa Davis, Pramodini Kale-Pradhan, Christina Madison, LeAnn Norris, Chasity Shelton, Michael Thomas, and Kathleen Vest.