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WesternU / College of Pharmacy / About the College / Facilities

Facilities

Teaching & LearningFACILITIES

College of Pharmacy classrooms reflect an innovative design intended to foster student-centered learning, where students are actively engaged in their learning process. The large classrooms, with a capacity to seat up to 144 students, are designed with six three-leaf-shaped tables, each leaf can accommodate seating for a team of eight students.

State-of-the-art technology in each of the classrooms allows for easy facilitation of active learning and transition between individual team activities to class-wide sharing.

Large screens are strategically placed surrounding the classroom, in addition to the smaller screens at each leaf to provide multiple ergonomically comfortable viewing angles. The small screens placed at each leaf also serves to promote individual group activities by allowing customized input for each group. The podium console is placed at the center of the classrooms to minimize the physical distance between the instructor and all students.

COP New Classrooms Open

The first-year classroom is designed with a Skyfold wall that divides the class into two smaller classrooms, sound proofed, and each equipped with separate podium consoles, to facilitate the teaching strategies that need to be done when involving a smaller number of students. In addition to the three large classrooms, there are twenty individual breakout rooms that are utilized to facilitate activities or assessments that require students or student teams to be in private rooms. All of the breakout rooms are also equipped for direct audio and visual communication with each of the classrooms.
  • Research Facilities

    The College of Pharmacy is dedicated to supporting research as a primary part of its mission. The Pharmacy Practice faculty are active participants in clinical research at their respective practice sites, which are located throughout the metropolitan Los Angeles area as well as other parts of Southern California.

    The Pharmaceutical Sciences faculty have over 7,000 square feet of research laboratory to support their research efforts. The laboratories are equipped with high-performance liquid chromatographs, a gas chromatograph, dissolution apparatus, molecular biology instrumentation (gel electrophoretic and PCR instrumentation), centrifuges, physiological recorders and ancillary equipment (refrigerators, -80°C freezers, water purification system, fume hoods, incubators, etc.). The College has developed a functional cell culture facility, a shared equipment room, animal behavioral labs and a computer-aided drug design lab. The computer-aided drug design consists of an eight node GPU computing cluster, drug design software (MOE, Sybyl), and molecular simulation software (NAMD, AMBER, CHARMM, Gaussian). The Pharmaceutical Sciences faculty, staff and graduate students are actively pursuing their research interests in the areas of cardiovascular and neurological pharmacology and physiology, pharmaceutical formulation development, pharmacokinetics, infectious disease, antibiotic resistance, computer-aided design, environmental toxicology, pharmacogenomics, and immunology.

    irst-Year WesternU College of Pharmacy students are guided by senior TA Dhruvitkumar Sutaria, MSPS '10 at a machine after students mixed and measured elements in the Professional Development Lab during a compounding aught by Sunil Prabhu, PhD, Assistant Dean for Enrollment Management, Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences. The college capitalized on the expansion of the University and was able to therefore expand their lab by moving to a new room and upgrading it with new equipment.

  • Other Research Infrastructure

    The University has in place an administrative and committee infrastructure to facilitate the conduct of research on campus. The following University Committees are routinely convened:

    • Research Advisory Council
    • Institutional Review Board
    • Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee
    • Research Committee

    The College has its own committees as well:

    • Research and Graduate Programs Committee
    • Pharmacy Practice Scholarship Committee

    • The University has an Office of Grants, Research and Contracts Administration, which is headed by Mr. Matthew Katz, MHA. Individual faculty research interests are found in the Faculty Profiles link. For more information on Research activities in the College of Pharmacy, please contact the Department of Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Sciences.