Page 10 - Pharmacology Newsletter 2022

ALUMNI PROFILES
This year, we are happy to profile 5 graduate program alumni. Their adventures after leaving UMN illustrate how an advanced degree in pharmacology can lead to rewarding careers in academia, industry, and related professions. Please feel free to reach out to these individuals if you would like to learn more about them or their career trajectories.
Tom Caruso
UMN training period: 1975 – 1977 (PhD)
UMN advisor: Akira Takemori
Current position/title(s): retired (last: Associate Director, Program Operations for the PCORnet Program)
Current institution: retired (last: Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute)
✉ Email: tcaruso2@gmail.com
Career overview: My career was charac- terized by disinterest in traditional aca- demic position, as well as my interests in information technology, biomedicine, clinical research, project management and founding a company. The details about this career path can be found in my blog 'My Search for a Career' My key accom- plishments were in developing teams that enjoyed the process of working together to successfully obtain goals. Among other accomplishments, these teams created: 1) A consortium of 4 Virginia universities in an Internet Technology Innovation Center that won a $2 million five year award; 2) A partnership of sixty-seven faculty across eight departments and four colleges that founded the Food, Nutrition, & Health Insti- tute at Virginia Tech; 3) A coordinated effort of the Virginia-Maryland College of Veteri- nary Medicine, the Offices of the Vice Presi- dent of Research, Provost, Executive VP for
Operations, and President of Virginia Tech, and the Virginia Legislature to fund, design and build an Infection Disease Research Building for $8 M; 4) A partnership of the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation of America and the Medical School at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill which creat- ed an online service for more than 15,000 individuals with Crohn's and colitis disease to participate in the planning of research and sharing of their data for this research; 5) The efficient operations and oversight of PCORnet, an organization of 32 integrated healthcare networks that were collectively, in addition to three organizations serving as the coordinating center for this program that supports research with data from more than 70 million electronic health records, and several 100,000 individuals with spe- cific diseases connected through disease- specific Patient-Centered Research Net- works. Some specific pieces of advice: If you are interested in the business aspects of the pharmaceutical industry, I suggest that you focus on getting a job in industry and work from that position to move into the business side of the industry. Don't do like I did, and pursue a business degree right out of your academic work. Also, learn to work in collaborations as soon as you can, because that's the best way to come into funding as early as possible, and build mentors, sponsors and advocates who will help you build your career.
Favorite UMN memories: My favorite memo- ries are the many speculations that Jeffrey Vaught and I had about methionine and leucine enkephalin and their potential in- teraction and role in the effects of opiates, including their role in tolerance and depen- dence. I believe none of these speculations were proven true, but it was certainly fun thinking about them.
Jeff Berg
UMN training period: 1980 – 1986 (PhD) UMN advisor: Aloysius J. Quebbemann Current position/title(s): President Current institution: AbelsonTaylor, Inc. ✉ Email: jeff.berg@abelsontaylor.com
Career overview: My thesis work in Al Quebbemann’s lab focused on the mech- anism of nephrotoxicity of cis-platinum, which was one the first inorganic com- pounds to be used to treat cancer and had only recently been used to treat testicular cancer. The UMN graduate program in pharmacology provided me the opportu- nity to develop critical analytical thinking skills that served me well throughout my career. I moved to Chicago in 1986 to be- gin working as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago in the laboratory of Dr. Adrian Katz. My work focused on the renal metabolism of atrial natriuretic pep- tide. From there, I joined the medical team at Boots Pharmaceuticals and worked on bioequivalence studies for marketed levo-thyroxines as well as other post-mar- keting clinical studies. In the mid 1990s, I switched over to the marketing team at G.D. Searle and worked on several com- pounds in clinical development to treat thrombosis that targeted the GPIIbIIIa receptor, the final common pathway in
10 UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA DEPARTMENT OF PHARMACOLOGY