New School of Pharmacy launches at The University of Reading

The UK’s newest School of Pharmacy will be officially launched at The University of Reading on Thursday 20 January. Professor Tony Moffat, former Chief Scientist of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, will be guest of honour at the event, which will also be attended by leading figures from academia, community, hospital and industrial pharmacy sectors.

The new School will be equipped with state-of-the-art teaching and research facilities. It will help meet the national need for newly trained pharmacists by providing pharmacy education, training, research and service development.

Professor Gavin Brooks, Head of the new School, said: “This venture represents a huge investment of time, money and effort by the University and the School aims to become a centre of excellence for pharmacy in the region and beyond. “The School will provide training for undergraduate, traditional post-graduate and ongoing professional pharmacy development audiences and is ideally placed within the Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire triangle to meet the widely recognised need for such a facility.

“The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education has already identified that pharmacists are ‘the nation’s experts on medicines’ and we at Reading are certain we will soon be producing some of the country’s leading pharmacists.”

Postgraduate education begins in January 2005 with a RPSGB-accredited course on Supplementary Prescribing for Pharmacists. In addition, the School has recently obtained Stage 3 Accreditation from the RPSGB to enrol students on to the four-year Master of Pharmacy (MPharm) programme from October 2005.

The School will be subdivided into five disciplines: Pharmacology; Pharmaceutical Chemistry; Pharmaceutics; Pharmacy Practice; and Postgraduate Education. As student numbers grow over the coming years, so will the number of high quality core pharmacy academic staff. Both staff and students will benefit from the School’s proximity to The University of Reading’s internationally renowned research groupings in the biomedical sciences, medicinal chemistry, nutraceuticals, food biosciences and plant sciences.

Professor Gordon Marshall, Vice-Chancellor of The University of Reading, said: “We are tremendously excited about this new development. The establishment of this new School constitutes a vital part of the University’s strategy to expand its current health and related teaching and research programmes. “I know many pharmacists across the country strongly support such a venture and I can assure them that we are committed to creating a leading School of Pharmacy.”