SPOKANE, Wash. – A University of North Carolina faculty member will be returning to the Northwest this summer when she joins Washington State University as an associate professor in the College of Pharmacy.
Mary F. Paine has a Ph.D. in pharmaceutics from the University of Washington and a B.S. in pharmacy from Oregon State University. She has been at the UNC at Chapel Hill since 1999.
Paine is a registered pharmacist who practiced for four years as a hospital pharmacist before returning to graduate school to pursue her Ph.D. After receiving her Ph.D., she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan Medical Center. In 1999, Paine joined UNC to lead a translational research laboratory in the university’s General Clinical Research Center. She later became an assistant professor at the Eshelman School of Pharmacy.
Paine’s primary, NIH-funded research program is focused on interactions between conventional medications and natural products, including food and herbal supplements. She is joining the College’s recently established Section of Clinical Pharmacology in Spokane. Clinical pharmacology – which is the science of drugs and their clinical use – will soon be the unit in WSU Health Sciences in Spokane focused on research issues commonly encountered in drug development, such as interactions among drugs and other compounds.
The unit is growing under the direction of Dr. K. Michael Gibson, who joined the College of Pharmacy in July 2012. Gibson had been chair of the Biological Sciences Department at Michigan Technology University in Houghton, Mich., but is also a past professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. He was brought to Spokane with financial assistance from the Health Sciences and Services Authority of Spokane County.