UF College of Pharmacy faculty win top award for best published work

Four educators with the University of Florida College of Pharmacy are winners of the 2003 national Rufus A. Lyman Award for the best work published in the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education.

Presented with the award at the July annual meeting of the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy in Minneapolis, the winners were: Douglas Reid, Ph.D., associate professor; Carole Kimberlin, Ph.D., professor; Michael Meldrum, Ph.D., associate professor, and Michael McKenzie, associate dean.

Reid, Kimberlin, Meldrum and McKenzie co-authored the paper, "Students" Perceptions of the Preparation to Provide Pharmaceutical Care. Co-author Gayle Brazeau, Ph.D., an associate dean of pharmacy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, also shared in the award.

The top-ranked paper evaluates each year of a four-year curriculum and reports students' perceptions of their readiness to perform advanced pharmacy practice competencies developed by UF faculty. The data provides information on student development and for continuous improvement of the academic program. The paper is timely because it provides a means of measuring the students' perceptions about their readiness for the reality of contemporary pharmacy practice.

The award, named for the first editor of the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, is sponsored by Merck and Company Inc. It offers a $5,000 cash prize to be split among the authors, and an inscribed plaque for each author.