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SPOKANE – A WSU pharmacy professor will spend fall semester working with and studying a select group of Parkinson’s Disease patients, thanks to a national fellowship award.
Joshua J. Neumiller, an assistant professor of pharmacy at WSU Spokane, is hoping to find out if intensive medication management will help the patients’ motor skills after they have gone through deep brain stimulation surgery.
Neumiller will be working with Spokane neurosurgeon Dr. Jonathan Carlson as well as the pharmacy and nursing departments at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane.
Neumiller received the only Pharmacy Faculty Development Fellowship in Geriatric Pharmacy that was awarded this year by the American Foundation for Pharmaceutical Education in Rockville, Md. Neumiller also will have help from other WSU College of Pharmacy and College of Nursing faculty.
The $25,000 Fellowship requires matching support from WSU. Neumiller has been relieved of all his teaching, advising, service, clinical practice and administrative responsibilities for six months starting in September to undertake this innovative research project.
Research on the subject is limited, and it is hoped that it will show that Parkinson’s patients fare better with intense attention to their medication regimen when hospitalized, Neumiller said. Through this work, the multidisciplinary research team hopes to further elevate and improve the level of exceptional care these patients already receive.
Neumiller is a certified geriatric pharmacist and has a clinical pharmacy practice at Elder Services in Spokane. He graduated from WSU in 2005 and has been a licensed pharmacist for the past five years.
