CAPSTONE TESTIMONIALS

 GRADUATES AND CURRENT PharmD candidates from the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences offer some capstone tips to prospective students:

Nicole Ink: “Ask questions and push yourself. With the capstone project, you can put in extra effort and get something really valuable out of it. It’s a fantastic talking point, especially for jobs and residency applications. It’s more than just something you need to graduate. It’s a unique and valuable opportunity from Binghamton University that should be embraced.”

Joe D’Antonio: “Anyone who has independent motivation, surrounds themselves with a group of people they can rely on and chooses a project they feel strongly about will not only succeed at their capstone project, but will have a wonderful time actually doing it.”

Juhi Gurtata: “The capstone requirement is an excellent opportunity for students to learn more about a topic of their interest, work alongside faculty and learn more about what research entails. If it wasn’t for this experience, I would have never gotten out of my comfort zone to participate in such a hands-on project.”

“This is beneficial to students because it broadens their CVs, broadens their opportunities and opens their eyes about what other career paths pharmacists can take,” says Mohammad Ali, assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences and director of the capstone program. “Pharmacists can be involved in clinical research, scientific research and even in post-doctoral fellowships with industry. The capstone program gives them a head start in those directions.”

Including a capstone project in the curriculum was a priority for the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences when it opened in 2017, says Tracy Brooks, associate professor and vice chair of pharmaceutical sciences.

“From the get-go, the focus here has been a research-intensive pharmacy school,” says Brooks, who works with students on capstone projects. “How do we make students appreciate the value of research? How do we involve them and expose them to some degree so they can understand the research enterprise and its values and difficulties, even if their career goals don’t include research again?”

The capstone program, which Brooks says is offered only at 25%-30% of pharmacy schools nationwide, provides PharmD students the opportunity to work in a solo research track or as part of a group setting.

“I start with them early in their second (P2) year with a series of seminars that introduces them to the capstone idea, the timeline and the expectations,” Ali says.

About five to eight students per year choose the solo track, while the remaining 60-70 take part in group research, Ali and Brooks say. For the group projects, Ali asks faculty members and preceptors to submit project applications, which are then examined and chosen by a capstone committee at the school. In a capstone project open house, the students meet with faculty members and preceptors to ask questions about projects. The research groups (usually containing four students) are then given a week to rank projects in their order of preference.

“We do our best to give them one of their top three [choices],” says Ali, who adds that there are 16-17 accepted projects per year.

In the solo research track (which has GPA requirements), students are involved in the project idea and work with faculty members or preceptors to propose their project to the capstone committee. Those students then take a three-credit lab in their third year to prepare for and initiate the research.

“It’s like a mini-thesis,” says Brooks, who coordinates the solo tracks. “In general, the research track students want more depth in their projects.”

But the group projects also offer challenges, she says, particularly for the faculty member or preceptor making the pitch.

“It has to be something that is of interest, but not an imminent requirement,” Brooks says. “They have to come up with a proposal, but wait about a year and a half before students are actually with them to do it.”

Assistant Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences Tony Davis gives direction to Kaiyu Tio, an undergraduate student in Harpur College of Arts and Sciences working in the Davis Lab.

All students work on projects during their final year and make a poster presentation in the weeks before graduation.

By the time students present their capstone posters, they are feeling assured and have gained a great deal of research knowledge. For many, it’s a far cry from the initial capstone discussions as P2 students.

Ink says she felt unsure about herself before embarking on a project with Ali examining DNA damage repairs in cancer cells.

“I gained a lot of confidence,” she says of the experience. “I started at Binghamton hesitant and afraid to make a mistake. As I went on, it was exciting to see this novel idea [grow]. I stopped worrying and focused more on what was happening with the project.”

Joseph D’Antonio, a 2023 Doctor of Pharmacy candidate from Hauppauge, N.Y., admits to being nervous when he first learned about the capstone requirement while interviewing at the pharmacy school in early 2019.

“To the uninitiated it can seem like a large and daunting task,” he says. “In our third year, we got to choose our research project and I have been beyond excited ever since. … When you read the school information resources and see ‘capstone — requirement’ listed in the fourth year, it automatically makes it feel intimidating. This feeling was exceptionally misplaced, but caused me to waste quite a bit of time being anxious about it looming on the horizon throughout my pharmacy-school career.”

D’Antonio is now working with fellow PharmD candidates Juhi Gurtata, Mana Halaji Dezfuli and Eric Kelly on a project mentored by Tony Davis, assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences, on drug molecules that might inhibit a key protein that plays a role in the tuberculosis proteasome pathway.

Gurtata says she was “indifferent” about

 BESIDES FACULTY MEMBERS, PharmD students get the opportunity to work with external preceptors from Northwell Health, Guthrie Robert Packer Hospital, Bassett Medical Center and even community pharmacies. In 2021, Bassett anesthesiologist Linda Demma and Bassett clinical pharmacy specialist Amanda Winans mentored students in a project that researched pain-management options for patients on opioid or blocker drugs.

Demma and Winans called the experience “mutually beneficial.”

“We share our knowledge and experiences with the students, and in return we learn from the students as well,” Winans says. “It allows for shared experiences on a larger level, affording dissemination of our findings to other regional and national platforms for greater benefit within the healthcare community.”

External preceptors such as clinical staff also bring a perspective that is different from faculty mentors, they say.

“Full-time clinical practice allows for routine encounters with complex patients and clinical conundrums that prompt research-related questions on a regular basis,” Winans says. “The students experience the full depth of research, beginning and ending with actual impacts on patient care.” the capstone requirement until examining the research projects proposed by the pharmacy school’s faculty.

Tony Davis, assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences, is surrounded by members of his capstone research group, all fourth-year students. Clockwise from left, Mana Halaji Dezfuli, Joseph D’Antonio, Eric Kelly and Juhi Gurtata.

“I got to learn more about the professors and their areas of interest, along with learning what interests me to potentially do research in,” says Gurtata, who adds that the capstone project has been one of her best experiences as a pharmacy student.

During the capstone process, students often discover that science does not always work as planned, Brooks says. And that’s OK.

“We see failures all the time,” she says. “It’s a normal thing. You have to revise on the fly. In science, you can come up with a great idea and it doesn’t go the exact way you planned. So you’ve got to go with the flow.”

It’s a lesson that D’Antonio and his group have already learned.

“Research is not straightforward,” he says. “There can be a massive difference between theoretical and practical pharmaceutical science, and in order to succeed in the research field it requires that you maintain a certain level of broad vision. This comes in handy when results of a given experiment end up not being in line with your hypothesis. It allows you the ability to step away from the protocol and question why things turned out how they did. From there you can go back and make small tweaks and adjustments to confirm your initial results and make improvements.

“Our particular research is important because tuberculosis is still one of the leading causes of infectious disease deaths in the world,” D’Antonio says. “Exploring the repurposing of existing therapeutics to perhaps treat this grave disease could perhaps one day save millions of lives.”

For Ink, conducting research in the capstone program led to her interest in oncology. The Guthrie residency has “scratched the itch” for still being involved in research, she says.

“I love working with patients and I love research,” she says. “One thing that made me go to residency is that we also [conduct] research there. It’s clinically based, but it’s also correcting data and determining results. It’s solving a puzzle that can lead to benefits for patient outcomes.”

The capstone program helps students such as Ink because it is a “differentiation,” Brooks says, as the research experience will make their pharmacy education and background stand out.

“It’s also going to help them appreciate science: new ideas, new drugs, the evaluation of one drug over another,” she says. “They can appreciate what comes behind all of those new discoveries, recommendations and guidelines. Even if students never do research, they can at least appreciate its value in the clinical field.”

Binghamton University publicly launched its $220 million EXCELERATE: Moving at the Speed of Binghamton campaign in April 2022 — its third and largest campaign by far. Remedies sat down with Dean Kanneboyina Nagaraju to talk about his priorities for the campaign and what it will do for the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

Help recruit and retain tenure-track faculty, split between the departments of Pharmacy Practice and Pharmaceutical Sciences, with appropriate startup funds.

Two faculty positions are already approved for fall 2023, and both will be interdisciplinary, with a primary appointment in pharmacy and a joint appointment with Decker College of Nursing and Health Sciences, Nagaraju says. One position, in collaboration with Decker College and its Motion Analysis Research Lab (MARL) will focus on frailty and aging and how we can model and understand the biomarkers of the changes that come with aging.

The second position will focus on investigating exercise mimetics, a class of drugs that mimic or enhance the therapeutic effects of exercise, especially in individuals who are nonambulatory.

“We’re initially focusing on these two positions because we already have expertise in muscle research,” Nagaraju says. “But if we want to build in a new direction and have the ability to develop interdisciplinary research, our foundation needs to be broader and strong.”

Additional faculty will allow Nagaraju to reduce each faculty member’s teaching load so they can focus on research, he adds. “That’s equally true for pharmacy practice faculty, not just pharmaceutical sciences,” he says. “I want tenure-track faculty in practice, but they have to have high-quality clinical research.”

Develop new programs at the master’s and certificate levels that will enhance the learning environment.

• A master’s degree in biopharmaceutical manufacturing: Biologics and immunotherapies are transforming the therapeutic landscape for many diseases, including cancer and autoimmune diseases. “There are not many programs that train scientists for these emerging therapies,” Nagaraju says. “Instead, people just evolve into positions, but with a master’s program, we could give them turnkey people.”

• A pharmacy technician certificate program: “This is a numberone priority for local hospitals,” Nagaraju says. “We could offer a low-cost program that will provide interns to these hospitals while students learn skills that will allow them to begin a career in pharmacy.”

With scholarship support, bring in high-quality students.

“We are not here to simply fill seats,” Nagaraju says. “We are here to develop the next leaders in pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences.”

Gifts of any amount can also be made to the Binghamton Fund for the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, which provides immediate-use dollars that can be used to fund the dean’s priorities and, thereby, the campaign priorities.

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