The School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences offers a PhD program in Pharmaceutical Sciences designed to train the next generation of scientists in the development, application, and integration of emerging technologies to advance research in pharmaceutical and biomedical fields. The program prepares graduates for research and scholarly work that expands knowledge in areas such as drug target discovery, drug testing, and drug delivery.

Graduates are well-equipped for careers in industry, academia, and healthcare leadership. Our faculty represent a wide range of research interests covering nearly every aspect of pharmaceutical science, including disease pathogenesis, molecular diagnostics, drug-target identification, drug design, pharmaceutics, biomarker discovery, and clinical development. Key disease areas of focus include muscular dystrophy, cancer, Lyme disease, bacterial infections, and autoimmune disorders.

Our faculty are internationally recognized leaders in their fields, with strong records of peer-reviewed publications and substantial funding from the NIH, private foundations, and the pharmaceutical industry.

PhD students typically complete rotations in three faculty labs before selecting a dissertation advisor in the spring of their first year. Research teams are often multidisciplinary, including chemists, neuroscientists, geneticists, biomedical engineers, and clinicians. It is common for students to have a secondary advisor from a different academic department to support their interdisciplinary research.