Pharmacy Rising – University of Montana’s top-funded Skaggs School of Pharmacy and is now ranked fifth in the nation among ninety-two pharmacy schools in total research funding.

When Professor Rich Bridges came to UM almost twelve years ago, the University’s sagging pharmacy school didn’t have the equipment needed to outfit his state-of-the-art neuroscience laboratory. It certainly didn’t have the money to buy the expensive gadgets Bridges needed to continue his research into the human brain. With just a dozen faculty members and only ninety students, the pharmacy school ranked near the bottom of similar institutions nationwide. Though Bridges himself is reluctant to say the school was struggling, some reports indicate that a few years earlier it was at risk of losing its accreditation.

Lab space was adequate, but funding for equipment was nearly nonexistent. Bridges says he remembers how the new dean, Dave Forbes, and Vernon Grund, pharmacy professor and chair of the then-fledgling Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, had to "piece together a start-up package" for his lab. Luckily, the Division of Biological Sciences was more than willing to help out. And support for Bridges came from several labs in UM’s biology and chemistry departments, as well as labs in the pharmacy school.

Grund remembers that biochemistry Professor Walter Hill donated at least one expensive and vital piece of equipment from his own lab to get Bridges up and running. Hill said he would do without until Bridges’ lab could buy its own. Bridges says that it was seeing generosity like Hill’s–done for the overall good of science on campus–that convinced him that coming to UM would be the right thing to do.

"The number of different groups that chipped in from outside of pharmacy and put equipment into my lab so I could do my experiments, I was blown away by that," Bridges says. "That never would have happened at a medical school, not in a million years."

The Skaggs School of Pharmacy (which includes the departments of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Pharmacy Practice) http://www2.umt.edu/pharmacy/

by Chad Dundas

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