The top winners of the “Capstone Research Project” - a year-long endeavor culminating in poster presentations by the 74 fourth year students making up the Class of 2013, are Hanh Thai, Michelle Friedman, and Christina Choi. The research projects of the three women were singled out as the most outstanding in the class by faculty members, with the winners then showcasing their work individually before an assemblage of faculty, staff and students.

“The Capstone Project enables our students to demonstrate their abilities in ways that are significant and meaningful,” said founding Dean Stuart Feldman, Ph.D. “They learn to develop research plans, design questions, and create experiments to find answers to those questions. They learn how to think about ways their research can make a difference.”

Hanh Thai, a student from Southern California who did her undergraduate work at the University of California, Riverside, studied the protein binding of the herbal product Rhodiola Rosea to help determine the product’s safety profile and possible drug interactions. Michelle Friedman, of the Midwood section of Brooklyn and a graduate of Lander College of Arts & Sciences – Flatbush, looked at patients at the Brooklyn Hospital Center who developed pneumonia that is resistant to a particular type of antibiotic. Christina Choi, who came to the United States at the age of three from Korea but who, like Ms. Thai, also hails from Southern California, researched divergent access to birth control pills among the populations of South Korea and the U.S. 

Touro College of Pharmacy, which opened in Harlem in September 2008, is committed to offering increased educational opportunities – especially in Harlem - through programs in pharmacy education, research and scholarship, and through service to the community and the profession. The school held its second commencement on May 23^rd at the New York Academy of Medicine.