Craig Lee, PharmD, PhD, can relate to the doctoral students at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy. He was one of them not that long ago. After earning his doctor of pharmacy degree at UNC in 2000, Lee did a two-year clinical research and drug development fellowship at the School and GlaxoSmithKline before entering the two-year-old doctor of philosophy program in the School’s Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics. In 2006, he became the second student to graduate from the program. Lee was recruited by numerous outstanding programs, but decided to accept a position as a tenure-track assistant professor in DPET.

In 2007, Lee received a two-year, $132,000 Beginning Grant-in-Aid from the American Heart Association for his research. He is studying the relationship between genetic variation in the cytochrome P450 epoxygenase pathway and mechanisms underlying the risk of cardiovascular disease. The project, which will include laboratory work with transgenic mice and a clinical study in patients with cardiovascular disease, grew out of Lee’s dissertation work.

In between applying for grants, setting up his lab, and hiring personnel, Lee took time out to discuss his experience as a student in the DPET program.

What made you decide to do both your PharmD and your PhD here at Carolina?

My fellowship experience at UNC was tremendous, and it helped me realize that I was interested in a career in academia. However, I felt I needed additional research training, particularly in the laboratory, to prepare me for an independent faculty position. I subsequently enrolled in the PhD program in Pharmaceutical Sciences at UNC in the relatively new DPET program. However, my dissertation research was completed as part of a collaborative relationship with a lab at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. I identified Dr. Darryl Zeldin at NIEHS, who has an adjunct appointment in DPET, as a potential advisor since we had some overlapping interests. I was fortunate to complete my dissertation research through a fellowship funded by the NIH, so that paid my stipend and enabled me to work at NIEHS.

Is that something that’s kind of unusual in a PhD program?

At the time I started the graduate program there was nobody in DPET doing laboratory-based cardiovascular disease research. There were certainly investigators doing clinical research in cardiovascular disease, one of whom was Dr. Herb Patterson, who was my primary DPET advisor. Dr. Zeldin and Dr. Patterson worked together to make sure I had a great translational research experience. The graduate program and DPET were really supportive of this collaborative arrangement. It worked out very well.

One of the primary goals in DPET is to train graduate students in translational research, or research that has both a laboratory- or discovery-based component and a human component—to take research hypotheses from the laboratory into the clinic. So we were actually required to have a human component to our dissertation research, which is something unique compared to more traditional PhD programs. The laboratory-based component of my dissertation research was completed entirely under the direction of Dr. Zeldin, a physician-scientist with whom I still actively collaborate. The epidemiology studies that translated my laboratory-based research into humans were completed in collaboration with faculty at the UNC School of Public Health. The great thing is that this work served as the impetus for my recently funded American Heart Association grant. All the preliminary data included in the proposal were part of my dissertation.

When you finished your PhD, you stayed on as faculty. How did that come about?

There was an open tenure-track position in DPET. I actually looked at positions at other schools of pharmacy around the country, some of which were starting graduate programs much like the one I had just completed, so they were looking for faculty freshly trained in this kind of program. There were some excellent programs that recruited me, but UNC has been undergoing some exciting changes the last few years, and it was a great opportunity. For instance, Dr. Howard McLeod was recruited from Washington University to start the Institute for Pharmacogenomics and Individualized Therapy. Many of my research interests lie in genomics and individualized therapy for cardiovascular disease, so I was very excited to hear he was coming here. That definitely was one factor that made my decision a little easier.

After looking around, it was clear that UNC really has a great collaborative atmosphere. I knew there would be a lot of opportunities to work with colleagues in the Division of Cardiology as well as at the NIEHS. The School of Pharmacy currently has a lot of exciting things going on, and the School is very supportive of young faculty. Being here at UNC has provided me with a lot of opportunity that I do not think would have been available if I had gone elsewhere.

In each stage of my training and career I evaluated other programs, and the best opportunity was always here at Carolina. I could not justify leaving just for the sake of leaving. There are people who have the philosophy that you should not end up where you trained, but I think there are exceptions to every rule, and Carolina was a good fit for me. One of the unique things was that, having done a lot of my graduate training at the NIEHS, I felt that I was also bringing something new back to the division. This includes the transgenic mouse model work initiated in Dr. Zeldin’s lab.

You mentioned that when you were done with your PhD and you were looking at other programs, some of them were starting graduate programs in this field. Is this something that’s relatively new?

It’s new to a lot of schools of pharmacy. At the University of Kentucky, Dean [Robert] Blouin started the first of these translational, clinical scientist PharmD/PhD-based graduate programs, and Dr. [Kim] Brouwer was the first graduate of that program. So a lot of the roots developed at the University of Kentucky, but those two individuals are now the dean of our School and the chair of DPET. So, we certainly have the leadership in place to make our program grow and flourish.

UNC’s clinical scientist program started back in 2000. I started in 2002. We have three graduates from the program now. The philosophy is to train individuals with a clinical pharmacy background in translational research. You are trained to ask mechanistic questions in the laboratory, but also to ask relevant questions in the clinic. There are not a lot of these programs out there, but more schools of pharmacy are starting them now. For tenure-track faculty, I think divisions of pharmacotherapy around the country are looking for faculty with PhD training more so than in the past. More schools are initiating these programs, and naturally they are looking for faculty to serve in mentoring roles. In addition, they are looking for junior faculty who are starting to graduate from these newer programs. I think it’s a good time if you are looking for a faculty position because schools are actively pursuing faculty trained in PharmD/PhD programs.

Do you think your experience as a student in this program helps you now that you are on the other side?

I think so. I kind of know where students are coming from. I know what worked for me and what didn’t, particularly in terms of balancing laboratory- and clinically-based research projects. So hopefully my prior experiences can help current and future graduate students have a better experience. In addition, I know what my training led to in terms of my having the opportunity to interview for these various faculty positions, so hopefully I can help guide students who are interested in taking the academic path.

What would you say were some of your favorite parts of your experience in the program?

I really enjoyed the independence of graduate school. You are put in a position where you ask the question and you answer it. If you don’t do the work necessary to answer it, no one else is going to do it. At times it’s daunting, but I think you really grow professionally by having that responsibility and accountability. It’s exciting. I had done a research fellowship where the first year I worked with a faculty member in DPET and the second year I worked at GlaxoSmithKline. I had a really good research experience, but the level of detail that you achieve in a PhD program was very surprising to me. I did not realize that I would gain so much more in terms of growth as a researcher by really immersing myself, and starting something from the beginning and taking it to the end in more or less an independent fashion. You have your dissertation committee, advisors and colleagues around you as a support system, but at the end of the day, you are charged with the responsibility to get it done. By putting yourself in that situation, you’re forced to learn how to do it.

Specifically with the DPET program, the translational nature of the program is really unique. I feel that the clinical training really helped enable me to ask clinically relevant research questions. I also believe I have a better perspective on what we observed in our human-based research and what it meant mechanistically. It was really exciting to be able to bridge the gap, and function in both aspects of research. One of the DPET program’s missions is to train students to be able to ask questions in both environments. I believe it definitely prepared me to function in this capacity as an independent investigator. Not only was I able to find a job, I was fortunate enough to get a grant funded based on the work I did as part of the graduate program. The research idea and the rationale for asking the questions asked in the grant proposal were all planted as part of my dissertation project. They were the natural next questions. I’m excited to have the opportunity to continue working on the same line of research, doing some of it collaboratively with Dr. Zeldin, but also doing much of it independently here at the School. Some of the academic success that came out of this work was exciting because we observed and discovered new things, we were fortunate enough to publish them, and I am now fortunate enough to get some support to continue and ask more questions.

What would you tell somebody coming into the program to expect?

It’s a lot of work. You’ve got to be really passionate about what you do. Research is exciting, but it’s very frustrating as well. Things don’t always work, and you run into roadblocks all the time. You really have to be passionate about what you’re doing, or it is probably not for you. Being able to work hard is really critical, but also just being open to going down paths that you didn’t expect to go down is important. People might come in with a really specific plan of “I want to do X, Y, and Z,” and it doesn’t really work out that way. Sometimes that’s frustrating, but sometimes that’s exciting and leads you down a road to things that you never thought you were going to do.

Did that happen to you when you were going through the program?

Definitely. The human part of my research ended up being very epidemiology-based, and I had no experience in epidemiology before. The questions we needed to ask were population-based questions, so I got a lot of experience in epidemiological research, took some courses, and was fortunate enough to work with some great collaborators who were really supportive and taught me a lot. It ended up being a great experience. I had no idea I would be doing this when I started graduate school. In addition, I had never worked with mice before, and a big part of my dissertation research was generating these new transgenic mice. I actually came into graduate school with some research experience as part of my fellowship training, and came in thinking I was going to continue along that path. However, I went into a whole new realm. So, I would advise students to be open and let the science take you where you need to go. As long as you are open and eager, you will end up having a much better experience than if you come in with preconceived notions about what you will only work on or not work on, because you might miss out on a lot.

I think one of the unique things about our program is that our pharmacy-trained graduate students are also required to maintain clinical experience. For example, one month a year I went on service in the coronary care unit at UNC Hospitals and rounded with the cardiology team, because my interest was cardiovascular disease and my research was centered around the development of new therapeutics for cardiovascular disease. In addition, most of the teaching that I did in graduate school was to pharmacy students, and this centered around therapeutics for cardiovascular disease. So the DPET program really helps you become an expert in a disease state. I think that helps you out as a researcher and also as a teacher, because you gain knowledge in all issues relevant to a specific disease state. In particular, I think these experiences really help you ask better research questions, because you know more about how these patients present to the clinic and what types of therapies work and don’t work. By actually being able to see the patients and by maintaining that clinical experience, you are able to observe in the clinic what the key questions really are. I think that helps you become a better researcher. Obviously you are not going to be a full-time clinician, but by maintaining that patient contact you don’t lose everything you learned as a clinical pharmacist, and you are able to keep current with changes in the field. I believe this ultimately makes you a better researcher.