Congratulations to UWSOP Outstanding Dissertation Award winner Dennis Goulet, Medicinal Chemistry, and Graduate Student Leadership Award for Medicinal Chemistry, Benjamin Maldonato.
The UW School of Pharmacy Graduate Program Awards offer special recognition of our preeminent graduate students and faculty.
Outstanding Dissertation Award: Dennis Goulet, Medicinal Chemistry
The UWSOP Outstanding Dissertation Award celebrates a graduate student who has conducted outstanding research at the doctoral (PhD) level. This year we celebrate Dennis Goulet, whose dissertation, “Biophysical Approaches for the Development of Stable, Long-Lived, Multi-Functional, and Potent Antibody Therapeutics,” was selected for UWSOP’s Outstanding Dissertation Award.
Dennis’ thesis work was highly impactful in several ways. His thesis concerned several aspects of therapeutic antibodies including the design of some novel constructs with potential new properties. His work also had a significant impact in the field of antibody design and characterization, resulting in five manuscripts published in excellent journals and he is first author on four of them, among other pending articles. Dennis developed a novel method with fluorescence correlation spectroscopy, to monitor antibody behavior in serum that sheds new light on how antibodies behave.
Dennis has demonstrated excellence throughout his graduate work here at UWSOP. In 2017, he was awarded the first Scott Grimm Memorial Scholarship and the prestigious UWSOP Magnuson Scholarship. From 2014-2016, he had a Pharmacological Sciences Training Grant, National Institutes of Health and from 2013-2016, he had an ARCS Fellowship.
Congratulations Dennis!
Graduate Student Leadership Award: Benjamin Maldonato, Medicinal Chemistry
The UWSOP Graduate Student Leadership Awards honors one graduate student in each of our three departments who has demonstrated outstanding leadership and service that has had a positive impact on the School of Pharmacy, UW, the Northwest community, scientific and/or professional community. Benjamin Maldonato received this year’s UWSOP Medicinal Chemistry Student Leadership Award. Ben is a senior graduate student in the Med Chem department, conducting his thesis research in Dr. Rheem Totah’s lab. He is well-regarded for his understanding the value of community and how to contribute to its strength, often leading or organizing events that benefit both Medicinal Chemistry and Pharmaceutics.
Ben has been very active in supporting the annual UW student chapter of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS)serving as Secretary, as well as NIH Predoctoral Training Grant events. In addition, he has been actively involved in student recruitment over the last several years, showing initiative in volunteering to support these important events. He has served as a judge for the Central Sound Science Fair (CSSF) which brings high school students from King and Snohomish counties together to present their science projects. In that role, he talks with students about their projects and ensures they have included proper controls, considered alternative strategies, undergone optimization, and utilized rigorous statistics.
Ben has been a trainee on both the UW ITHS TL1 Multidisciplinary Predoctoral Clinical Research Training Program and the UW Pharmacological Sciences Training Program. In 2017, he presented at the Gordon Research Conference on Drug Metabolism and will intern in the highly-competitive Drug Metabolism Pharmacokinetics (DMPK) department of Boehringer Ingelheim this summer.
Congratulations Ben and thank you for your leadership and mentoring!
To study with peers like Dennis and Benjamin, click for more information about our Graduate Programs in Medicinal Chemistry.