Students and trainees brought their discoveries to life when presenting their findings to judges, faculty and peers – along with undergraduates curious about research – at Monday's VCU School of Pharmacy Research Day.

The event included more than 45 poster presentations, remarks from Mary Peace McRae, Pharm.D., Ph.D., associate dean for research and graduate studies, K.C. Ogbonna, Pharm.D., dean of the VCU School of Pharmacy, and Cynthia Dowd, Ph.D., the event's keynote speaker and a 1999 graduate of VCU SoP's Ph.D. in pharmaceutical sciences with a concentration in medicinal chemistry.

After taking the audience on a walk down memory lane sharing photos of the school and its faculty, including Malgosia Dukat, Ph.D., and Richard Glennon, Ph.D., in the late '90s, Dr. Dowd shared her findings from the drug design and synthesis projects she is leading related to antibiotic and antimicrobial resistance – and the potential uses of this technology in treating diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria. Now a professor and chair of George Washington University's Department of Chemistry, Dr. Dowd "has spent over a decade engineering fosmidomycin into chemical analogs that could prove to be more effective drugs," C&EN News reported this fall at the ACS Fall Meeting.

Throughout the day, students shared their findings on a range of topics: drug delivery research to reduce how often patients with corneal injury need treatment, pharmacokinetics research on treatments for brain trauma injury, drug development research on colorectal cancer treatment, pharmaceutical engineering research to reduce ventilation-induced lung and brain injury, pharmacotherapy research on the impact of HIV and sex differences on inflammation in the brain, pharmacoeconomics and health outcomes research on chronic pain management for cancer patients, and so much more.

"When we consider the strength of research within our School of Pharmacy, we cannot make the discoveries and breakthroughs in our fields that we do without our students and postdoctoral fellows," Dean Ogbonna said. "Our students and trainees are the engine that drives this work. The work our students and trainees are doing has been recognized at the university, local, regional, national and international levels, and the impact of this work has been felt just as widely."

The day closed with Dr. McRae and Doug Sweet, Ph.D., announcing the winners of several awards, including poster presentation awards. Our VCU School of Pharmacy Research Day award winners are: