Pharmaceutical sciences graduate students at the School of Pharmacy can now specialize their training through a new concentration in pharmacodynamics, the study of how drugs affect and interact with the body.

Temple is the only pharmacy school in the Mid-Atlantic to offer this concentration to its graduate students.

Pharmacodynamics at Temple has evolved and strengthened over the past several years through an increase in federal research funding, the recruitment of new research faculty, and the opening of a state-of-the-art Center for Bioanalysis.

According to associate professor Ellen Walker, there is a growing market need for such expertise.

“This program will equip students for both academia and industry by concentrating on integrated pharmacokinetic [how the body reacts to drugs], pharmacogenomic [how various genes determine drug behavior] and drug action research,” she said.

The mission of the new graduate program is to train students to contribute to the fundamental understanding and application of the pharmaceutical sciences: namely, drug disposition and mechanisms of drug action (pharmacodynamics), drug synthesis and structure-activity relationship studies (medicinal chemistry) and drug delivery (pharmaceutics).

For more information about the program, contact director of graduate studies Daniel Canney at 215-707-4948.