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At the Center for Family Medicine, we had started a medication-for-opioid-use-disorder team clinic one-half day each month to serve patients driving up to six hours to get into our clinic as one of the only practices in South Dakota. Soon afterward, the state had received grant funds to expand medication-for-opioid-use-disorder training.

Research and scholarly activity have always been an important part of the faculty’s work in the Department of Pharmacy Practice. What the research and scholarly activity have looked like over the years has varied quite a bit.

Research is one of the key pillars of the Department of Allied and Population Health. Our multidisciplinary department brings faculty from respiratory care, medical laboratory sciences, pharmacy and public health backgrounds to work together to improve care of patients. Faculty are either tenure-track researchers with upward of 25% or higher dedicated time for research or nontenure track practice/instructional faculty with an emphasis on instructional scholarship and clinical service. Our research, therefore, can be broadly classified into research and scholarship of teaching and learning.

The research in my lab is focused on solving drug-delivery challenges at the interface of material and biological sciences. To this end, our current research is focused on developing oral pediatric drug-delivery systems using natural food protein biopolymers and localized drug-delivery approaches for breast cancer.

The department’s research efforts started with the hiring of Chandradhar Dwivedi in 1987 as the first research faculty member. His leadership from 1987 to 2013 was instrumental in establishing the research program in pharmaceutical sciences.

Tummala, a professor and graduate program coordinator in pharmaceutical sciences, has more than 20 years of research experience in disease biology, immunology and drug delivery.

Chandrasekher is performing research that could lead to development of cornea-equivalents for transplantation purposes. Corneal transplantation, which is referred to as ‘keratoplasty’ in ophthalmology clinics, is the most common treatment for irreparable corneal damage. In most cases, only the diseased or injured section of the cornea is replaced.

Hunt, an associate professor, directs the Master of Public Health program within the Department of Allied and Population Health, arriving at ³ÉÈËÊÓƵ in September 2019.

START-SD (Stigma, Treatment, Avoidance, and Recovery in Time in South Dakota) is three-year, $1 million federally funded project with a goal of reducing mortality associated with opioid-use disorder among adults aged 25-54 in in Brookings, Codington and Hughes counties.

The A research lab focuses on genomics. The human genome has all of the instructions necessary for one’s 30 trillion cells to function correctly. When mutated, the genome is also unfortunately responsible for myriad genetic disorders. The source of such mutations can be external, such as from exposure to UV rays or carcinogens.