Pharmacy Marks Two Decades A look back with retiring Pharmacy Dean and Professor Alan B. McKay, Ph.D.

Sitting in a gradually emptying, half-packed office at the Health Professions Building (HPB) on the Winchester Medical Center campus in early March, Bernard J. Dunn School of Pharmacy Dean and Professor Alan B. McKay, Ph.D., prepares for his upcoming retirement, as the pharmacy program he founded celebrates its 20th year of operations.

“For those who don’t have that long a memory, this was actually a peach orchard,” Dr. McKay said of the site of the HPB, which has housed the pharmacy program since its inception. “And when I came here, they still had peaches hanging from the trees.” An avid amateur photographer, McKay recalls taking photos of the scenes from a nearby hill and thinking to himself, “We’ve got a long way to go.”

“And, interestingly enough, 21 years later, that prophetic statement was accurate, because it was at the very beginning of a lot of changes that were occurring in health care; it was at the very beginning of a significant period of growth for Shenandoah University,” said McKay, who began his tenure at the school on July 5, 1995.

It also marked an era poised to produce advancements in pharmacy. When Shenandoah established its school, there were only 74 pharmacy schools in the nation. Now, there are 140, and Shenandoah was one of four to open in the same year. McKay said the HPB was constructed by Valley Health over 11 months after his hiring, and the university received its certificate of occupancy on the Thursday before the Monday on which classes started. “We basically had to sit on the floor and teach the first classes,” he said.

“So, in that 20-year period, we’ve seen pharmacy as a discipline expand dramatically in terms of the scope of the responsibility of the pharmacist [and] the practice environment — but more importantly, all of these new schools that have come along after that, began after we started that endeavor,” said McKay, whose retirement will be official this summer.

The pharmacy school has produced approximately 2,700 graduates (traditional and non-traditional) and become known for its innovative character. It’s a quality McKay made visible three years after the program’s inception, when the school worked with an artist and holographic designer to create a holographic emblem that combined the image of a laptop, with the double helix of DNA displayed on the laptop screen. By 2000, the human genome sequence was announced. By 2003, the school started offering genome education. And, by 2005, the Bernard J. Dunn School of Pharmacy had added pharmacogenomics (the study of drug therapies as they relate to a person’s genetic makeup) to its curriculum and as a recently discontinued stand-alone program. The school offers traditional and non-traditional doctor of pharmacy (Pharm.D.) programs and a Pharm.D./MBA dual degree.

Today, pharmacogenomics is embedded in the school’s coursework, and the school is making new inroads in the areas of health information technology and genomics. Students have received laptops since the very beginning of the pharmacy program ­— a somewhat unusual move back in the mid-1990s. “We had it right,” McKay said of the pharmacy school’s vision. “It just took longer for technology to catch up with us.”

McKay recalled how one colleague — a dean at a public university — toured the pharmacy school and was so impressed by what he saw that he asked if he could get his camera from his car to take photos of the program, basically taking a second tour to do so. “I was thinking to myself, if a colleague of yours feels comfortable enough, but impressed enough, by what you’ve done to want to take pictures to take back to his colleagues and to his school, you probably are doing something remarkable.”

It’s unsurprising that the school has taken an innovative path over its two decades, when one considers the personality of its dean.  When McKay does leadership training, he’s always found to be “futuristic.” “I’m constantly thinking about things on the edge,” he said. He’s always considering new ideas and their implications for pharmacy. He’s fascinated by how new technological developments confirm that society is  entering an era of ever-increasing data and subsequent knowledge generation that will challenge future generations of pharmacists and healthcare professionals to keep up with the deluge of information.

He’s been on that edge since he first interviewed with Shenandoah President Emeritus James Davis, Ph.D., about becoming the pharmacy school’s founding dean. He recalled answering Davis’ question about how public and private schools operate differently. At a public university, tax money is the primary funding source, said McKay, who had worked at both public and private institutions. “If you’re in a private institution, you always have to be prepared to go out and find the resources that you need, and be creative about how you deploy them,” he remembers telling Dr. Davis, noting that there are never enough resources, either. “So, to a great extent, you have to be a combination of an entrepreneur, and somewhat creative, because you’re going to have to make up for what you lack in resources with your creativity and your ideas,” McKay said.

Such an entrepreneurial spirit is a hallmark of McKay’s character. He started his educational career, with slide rule in hand, as an engineering student. That field of study didn’t work out, “so I volunteered and became a Navy corpsman, which helped me do a lot of things. It taught me to respect human life, it taught me to respect legality and what teams can do. It taught me to be patient. And it taught me to respect the fact that some things were out of my control.” He said he tries to teach his students the same lessons he learned back then: “To respect human life, to be patient and to understand that they can’t solve everything alone.” If students remember those basic lessons, he said, “they can accomplish far more than I ever did.”

While innovative and future-leaning, McKay is also practical, and he developed the pharmacy school in a practical way. When talking to others about the school, he has always said, “There is no formula for what we’re doing.” Instead, it’s a school built from understanding what did and didn’t work in other places. “It was creating something that was avoiding the mistakes of others and trying new things that other schools were unable to do,” McKay said. “And I think that the large message of this is that when you’re given the opportunity to make something from scratch, you have an inherent obligation to test the edges, to find out what is possible,” he said. “So that’s what a new school offers — an opportunity to recreate the future,” he said.

The way the Bernard J. Dunn School of Pharmacy has recreated its future, according to McKay, is through its students and graduates, of whom he is so proud, he immediately tears up at the thought of them and how they’re conducting their careers and lives.

“They’re working for the biotech companies that are coming up with solutions to diseases that we can’t cure, they’re working for informatics companies to make the health care system more efficient, they’re practicing community pharmacy in a much more compassionate and informed way than I saw practiced when I came into pharmacy years and years ago, [and] they’re teaching our own students,” he said, noting that a graduate, Dr. Jim Green, is running the Northern Virginia Campus pharmacy program.

“The legacy of the school will be that it’s innovative. The legacy of the school is that we’ve graduated countless alumni who have gone out and recreated the practice of health care, [in] pharmacy and other areas.”

McKay hopes the next, as-yet-unnamed dean will take the school even further and own its future, just as he has owned its past.

Then, McKay, who still teaches — two pharmacy classes and one Harry F. Byrd, Jr. School of Business course this semester — told one of his stories. He’s famous for using stories to convey lessons. He recalled his childhood as a Boy Scout, and how he learned a Latin phrase from a fellow scout, which, loosely translated, means “Fortune favors the brave.” It’s a phrase he repeats to students. “If they remember that the future is in the hands of the brave, they’ll take those risks and they’ll test the edge, and they’ll come up with new solutions.”