This story originally appeared in PittPharmacy:
Finally—the fourth floor entrance to Salk Hall has reopened! On my way out of Salk Hall, I pass the Elmer H. Grimm Sr. Pharmacy Museum and walk through the doorway. I stop, remembering the old brick walkway and the concrete steps to the parking lot.
How different it is now! Instead of stepping onto the bricks, I see the sparkling terrazzo floor of our beautiful new Commons. The new tables and chairs, which are located in an area brightened by skylights, catch my eye. As I look up toward the skylights, I am impressed by the architectural giant clock that was donated by the Class of 2012. On the clock, noon is appropriately marked ’12 and the six position displays the School of Pharmacy seal—just like my Pharmacy scholarship golf outing shirt.
Finally, I can get a cup of coffee without leaving our building. Right below the clock is a coffee shop that was generously donated by the Class of 2011. The alumni voted on the possibilities for names and I see the sign that says “Rxpresso.” I really like the cup logo because, to me, it looks like the letters, U P—as in University of Pittsburgh. What do you think?
I walk to the glass doors of the CVS Health Conference Room and peer through the doors. With its red chairs (see photo inside cover) and maple table, it looks like a great place to hold a meeting. An interesting arrangement of monitors in the inside perimeter of the table allows each person to look at the other people across the table and see the media at the same time. You will have to see this room for yourself!
Walk with me now to the front door. As I go out the main entry across from the John M. and Gertrude E. Petersen Events Center, I walk outside through large glass doors to a big patio area. And here, I find our new brick walkway where all of the older bricks have been relocated. Phew, we didn’t lose any! I spot bricks a few old friends donated and it occurs to me that I should get my own. There is room for your brick, too, if you do not already have one.
The area outside our door on Sutherland Drive has been transformed into what looks to me like an Italian piazza. The students are going to love this area to catch some Pittsburgh sun. I turn around and look at the impressive School of Pharmacy entrance (yes, finally). When I enter the glass doors, I am greeted by a magnificent granite piece with the University of Pittsburgh seal etched into the granite.
As I turn to go up the steps, I see the enormous wooden plaque that recognizes two main corporate sponsors, whose generous gifts helped make the Commons possible. Thank you Giant Eagle Pharmacy!
Walking back toward the Grimm Museum, I walk up the steps by the extraordinary donor recognition wall. I see the familiar phrase “Honoring our Past, Shaping our Future.” Names of alumni and friends who generously supported to the School of Pharmacy with lifetime gifts of $10,000 or more during our capital campaign will be etched inside an abstraction of a DNA double helix. I am glad that I am part of our DNA and that my name will be there. All names will be etched after June 2016. There is still time for you to be a part of our DNA.
I decide to experience one more aspect of the new building—the bridge. I head into Salk Hall. As I walk through what is now a door at the end of the hallway on the fifth floor, I am on a glass-walled bridge that connects Salk Hall and the Research Pavilion. I stop to look toward the end of the Commons. There, I see the beautiful piece of artwork Aerial Scape, a large enamel on steel mural, by the late Virgil Cantini, who was chair of the Department of Studio Arts at Pitt. It is bright, colorful, and brings energy to the room. I love it!
Now I want to show you why all of our research faculty and staff have been smiling and are so happy. I continue across the bridge and walk through the door to the research building.
A Place to Discover– Our New Research Building
As I enter the door to the research building, I am now on the second floor (fifth floor Salk to second floor of Research–we are on a hill). The first thing I notice is the newness of everything— the maple doors and the patterned carpet.
To my left is the new, open laboratory space. To my right are faculty offices, which we will inspect first. The offices are grouped together to encourage faculty members to share ideas through repeated interactions (another way of saying they frequently meet each other in the hallway or lab entrance).
Pharmacy occupies two floors of the Research Pavilion, both with “research neighborhood” groupings of faculty, students, and staff. This floor houses the Clinical Pharmaceutical Sciences Department and the Drug Discovery and Development Department. Lisa Rohan has a large group working on antiviral drug delivery for the prevention of HIV transmission in women. Kerry Empey’s team is working on the RSV virus and has created great models to develop new vaccines. I ask Kerry how she likes the new space and, without hesitation, she says, “I love it! Being in this new laboratory space makes it so easy to collaborate. Lisa and I are starting a new project together!” Collaborations are already forming and the building has only been open for one week!
Sean Xie has a group from his recently funded National Institute of Drug Abuse Center of Excellence for Computational Chemogenomics Drug Abuse Research working on the discovery of new drugs through computational chemogenomics and rational drug design. One of the pathways he is investigating happens to be of immediate interest to Sam Poloyac, whose team is investigating the roles of cytochrome P450 metabolizing enzymes in traumatic brain injury. Sam tells me that he did not realize that Sean was interested in this particular cellular pathway until recently when the pair was discussing graduate student projects. Now, as a result of their shared interests, they are working together using Sean’s tools combined with Sam’s experimental techniques to find a treatment to lessen the damage caused by traumatic brain injury. The dean designed the placement of the labs to create research neighborhoods and, in just a short time, it seems to be working well.
Sam Poloyac is ecstatic about the new, specifically purposed space for his mass spectrometry laboratory or, more accurately, his “Small Molecule Biomarker Core Laboratory.” His laboratory provides research support for the analysis of biomarkers that help define response to drugs, better define disease, and identify new targets for drug discovery.
The next group is Tom Nolin’s research team, which is studying the effects of renal disease on drug metabolism. Tom is excited about the efficiency of the laboratory and its potential to facilitate graduate student’s interactions. Tom explains, “The open space will increase students helping students. It will be easy for a beginning student to ask a more senior student for help and advice which will enhance our program.”
As I walk past Tom’s research benches, I see Phil Empey talking with Jim Stevenson. They are discussing the implementation of a pharmacogenomics service for hospitalized patients. In Salk Hall, they were on different floors; now, their offices are only a few feet apart and their lab areas are adjacent. Their pharmacogenomics project is an essential element of the precision medicine strategy at Pitt.
Also, Phil is working on the role of ATP-binding cassette transporters in neurological injury and overcoming drug transporters
to treat pediatric traumatic brain injury. This work fits well with Sam Poloyac’s research program and it is great that their students can share learning opportunities.
I walk back to the elevators and head up to the next floor that houses the Clinical Pharmaceutical Sciences and Drug Discovery and Development departments. The Center bridges pharmacy and genetics by developing cutting-edge research and applying it to drug discovery and development. As I exit the elevator, I walk down the hall towards the break room where I see Director Wen Xie talking with some students.
Wen reinforces the collaboration theme of the research space, “The open lab space is great for increasing interactions within our Center. I like that one person may be weighing some compound and next to them is someone preparing to extract and they have the opportunity to exchange ideas. A lot of great ideas start in these small random interactions.” This is really important now that the Center has grown to include five faculty members and about 35 research staff and graduate students.
Wen walks with me into the laboratory and shows me the area where his research group is studying the nuclear receptor control of energy metabolism. Part of their work is identifying new potential drug targets that may help control obesity and diabetes.
Da Yang’s research team is next to Wen’s and he is talking with a postdoctoral researcher. I ask Da what he likes best about the open lab and he laughs and says, “I love showing off to our collaborators from outside the school!” Da is integrating genetics and functional studies to improve cancer therapy. Recently, he found the unexpected result that ovarian cancer patients with BRCA2 gene mutations respond to cisplatin. His work is definitely contributing to the precision in precision medicine.
Xiaochao Ma’s team is also located in this part of the lab. His research team is using sophisticated analytical techniques and study designs to study the role of nuclear receptors in drug-drug interactions and adverse drug reactions. He is evaluating the metabolome to determine if there are small molecule biomarkers for drug-induced liver injury. His work will help guide the development of safer drug therapies.
Wen shows me an empty lab area that is being held for Christian Fernandez, a new faculty member who will be joining the Center in the fall. Currently, Christian is at St. Jude’s Research Hospital working with Mary Relling, an internationally recognized researcher in pharmacogenomics. Wen says, “The new research space is a great recruiting tool and significantly helped in our recruitment of Christian.”
The last person I see on my way out of the lab is Song Li. Generally, Song has a smile on his face, but it is extra wide since he moved his into the new research space. He is doing some incredible work on developing systems to deliver medications to the lung, including nanoparticles and gene delivery systems. Song shows me how the new procedure and equipment rooms have made it easier to share equipment and have increased the efficiency of research. He takes me to the conference room where a meeting with his lab assistants is about to take place.
As I walk back across the bridge to Salk Hall, I think about how the recurring theme of the open concept in the laboratory space and the colocated offices have stimulated interaction and collaboration. I know that graduate students,
staff, and faculty are all benefiting from being in closer proximity to one another. The people and environment makes it a pleasure to come to work every day. Walk with me back to Salk Hall.
A Place to Learn: Reimagining Salk Hall
As I walk back into Salk Hall, I see that the vacant, empty laboratories can be used in different ways. Our goal is to create the same type of neighborhoods and interaction spaces for our faculty, staff, and students in Salk Hall as we did in the Research Pavilion.
Some of the repurposing of Salk Hall laboratories is already underway. We created a temporary, new computational space for Sean Xie’s NIH-funded Center of Excellence in Computational Chemogenomics in Drug Abuse Research. A plan for a permanent space is being developed that will be a collaborative area for faculty members who use computation as part of their research. Josh and Carolyn Thorpe’s outcomes research groups and some pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamics modelers will share the newly conceptualized computation laboratory. We will gain efficiency in the use of hardware and software licenses and with luck, peer learning will occur just as it did in the Reasearch Pavilion. The space will have enough computers and workstations to allow use of the computational tools on an ad hoc basis and to hold small graduate and advanced, professional student computer- based classes.
Right next to the future computational space will be a new mid-size classroom. We are so excited for the transformation, which will make use of the large windows found in older buildings. This classroom room is being designed to have multiple uses. It will provide a new learning space for the PharmD and graduate programs and provide a unique space for group work in smaller classes. We need this and more teaching spaces. On its own, the graduate program has grown to more than 80 students over the last few years.
The classroom will also serve as the main “maker” space for the Pharmacy Innovation Laboratory. One space in the room will have a glass wall partition. This space can be used to simulate a pharmacy patient area or other activity to try various ideas for improving practice and the patient experience.
In the evenings, we plan to make this space available to students for project work, inventing, and studying.
We have been fortunate to have been given additional laboratory space on the fifth floor that will be the home of Shilpa Sant and Paul Johnson’s laboratories. Shilpa is working on tissue-engineered tumor models that recreate the three-dimensional structure, cell-cell/ cell-matrix interaction, stromal environments, and signaling cues present in vivo. These three-dimensional models will be used for preclinical evaluation of drug safety and efficacy. Paul’s team is working on high-content screening methods to identify chemicals with the potential to become drug products. This laboratory space is much more open than their previous space and will leave room for expansion.
I head up to the sixth floor, which is almost totally occupied with bench laboratories. This does not look like much now, but it has many large windows that will create a bright environment for our community pharmacy program, which is working to improve pharmacist care and patient health in the community.
Currently, the space is divided into many small laboratories. With a little bit of imagination, you can picture a group of offices and a conference room for the faculty similar to those in the new research building—all with windows and modern lighting. This will make it easier to share and stimulate more great work in the community. We will have a defined space for our residents and fellows to share and interact with faculty and staff. This is where we could also locate our ever-ready video recording room for creating new content for online learning.
We can transform other vacated laboratories into small classrooms that will allow us to effectively use new methods of teaching and learning, such as the high-fidelity human simulator. We could have enough rooms to efficiently offer more simulated experiences with standardized patients. We are national leaders in the training and development of patient care services in the community and this Community Center would enhance collaboration and great ideas, like the new research building does for our laboratory scientists.
We are preparing the professional leaders of tomorrow. I am excited about the benefits to the future of pharmacy that will result from our students who learn in these environments that support innovation, problem solving, and critical thinking.
We see the tremendous potential to build state-of-the-art learning environments and research environments. As I take the elevator back to my office on the eleventh floor, I think about how generous our alumni and friends have been to the School and hope we can continue to work together to make our reimagined Salk Hall a reality.
