Connie Young

Class of 2025 student pharmacist Catalina Yepez, age 29, is one of five students in the inaugural class in the rural health track. The track is part of the college’s […]

First-year student pharmacist Chase King, age 21, is one of five students in the inaugural class in the rural health track. The track is part of the college’s Rural Health […]

First-year student pharmacist Bradley Brown, age 22, is one of five students in the inaugural class in the rural health track. The track is part of the college’s Rural Health […]

First-year student pharmacist Michael Sauseda, age 40, is one of five students in the inaugural class in the rural health track. The track is part of the college’s Rural Health […]

First-year student pharmacist Amanda Whitehead, age 33, is one of five students in the inaugural class in the rural health track. The track is part of the college’s Rural Health […]

Tyler Young grew up in Oakesdale, Washington, a town of about 400 people, and a 45-minute drive south of Spokane. He graduated from high school with only 11 other students in his class and his first job was on the wheat farm where he spent summers from ages 14 to 20 spraying weeds in 90-degree heat, driving a tractor, and harvesting the crop.

A recent $2.2 million gift to Washington State University’s College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences (CPPS) will increase opportunities for PharmD students to focus on the health care needs of residents in rural Washington.

This extraordinary anonymous gift has helped to launch CPPS’ Rural Health Initiative (RHI) to improve access to health care in the rural communities of Washington. Started in the fall of 2021, RHI is an ambitious 10-year plan to create opportunities for student pharmacists and post-graduate pharmacists to specialize in delivery of rural health care. Access to health care providers in rural Washington continues to be a challenge for the nearly 800,000 residents living in these areas. It’s estimated that Washington needs 600 new providers to eliminate this gap in access to care. The Rural Health Initiative aims to alleviate this problem.

Pharmacogenomics, a budding field of personalized medicine, is the study of how genes influence an individual’s response to treatment with medications. Drug-related morbidity and mortality due to unoptimized medication therapy is estimated to cost the United States $528 billion annually. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, adverse drug events (ADEs) have been categorized as a leading cause of preventable death in the United States.

Second-year pharmacy student Tajana Vujic was recently appointed in the American Pharmacist Association Academy of Student Pharmacist (APhA-ASP) as regional member at large, a national position, where she will be […]

As the associate dean of external relations, Julie Akers has helped to connect people in more ways than one. When she is not advocating for the pharmacy profession or teaching […]