WASHINGTON – The Howard University School of Pharmacy is now the College of Pharmacy, a freestanding entity, and no longer part of the College of Pharmacy, Nursing and Allied Health Sciences. 

The new college was recreated July 1 as part of the University’s ongoing Academic Renewal, giving Howard University 13 schools and colleges. Anthony K. Wutoh, Ph.D., has been named dean of the college.  Wutoh, a registered pharmacist, is responsible for the day-to-day leadership and operation of the college’s programs.  

Dr. Eve Higginbotham, senior vice president and executive dean for Health Sciences, said the University felt it appropriate to make the pharmacy school a stand alone college because of the strength of its programs and to bring it in line with the nation’s other pharmacy academic programs.

“Over 80 percent of pharmacy programs are freestanding,” said Higginbotham, who oversees the College of Pharmacy, College of Nursing and Allied Heath Sciences, College of Medicine, College of Dentistry, Howard University Health Sciences Library and Howard University Hospital.  “This puts us in the framework of what we find in the overall academic pharmacy community.”

The change also allows the program to build on its strengths and to attract more academic funding from the federal government and investment from private industry, she said.

Higginbotham pointed to the college’s new Center for Drug Research and Development, as an example of its strengths.

Wutoh said the 4,900 square foot, state-of-the-art facility gives the University the ability to conduct drug research and will accelerate the discovery and development of new drugs and drug products.

The center’s five laboratories and other facilities give faculty, students and outside companies the capability to work on every phase of drug development, from working with the raw pharmaceutical ingredients to the manufacture,  packaging and labeling of the product.

“Our research facility is an example of the potential in the college,” said Wutoh, who served as associate dean of the School of Pharmacy before the transition.

Construction on the center began in 2007.  It was funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National center for Research Resources.

Higginbotham also noted that College of Pharmacy was a key player at the recent BIO International Convention, the global biotech convention that drew 15,626 industry leaders to Washington from June 27 to June 30 from 48 states and 65 countries.  An estimated 100,000 scientists and others attended the convention.

Howard was the only Washington-area school invited by the U.S. government to meet with Turkish government and academic officials who were interested in developing their own academic training in pharmacy graduate programs as well as their own pharmaceutical industry.

Additionally, the college has HIV training projects in Washington, DC, as well as internationally in Nigeria and East Africa, which includes Tanzania, Rwanda, Zambia, Kenya and southern Sudan. Project coordinator Grace Jennings, Ph.D., oversees the project in Nigeria, and the College of Pharmacy’s Henry Fomundam, Pharm. D., is the regional director for the East Africa project, called “ROADS.”

Wutoh, who also serves as the co-director of the University’s Center of Excellence and director of the Center for Minority Health Services Research, said as dean, he plans to “make sure that we’re positioned as one of the top pharmacy schools in the country in terms of the quality of our education, our research and our service to the community and the nation.”