State of the College of Pharmacy Address 2015

The University of Cincinnati is well known for its social media savvy administrators, including Dean Neil MacKinnon, PhD, at the James L. Winkle College of Pharmacy.  MacKinnon is so engaged in social media that he was named the second "Top Pharmacist  Influencer” worldwide on Oct.  1 in the 2015 #Pharmacist Global Tweet-A-Thon.

"It took a whole team of students (the student chapter of ASP at the University of Arkansas) to gang up and top me,” MacKinnon joked as he spoke before faculty staff and students at his third annual State of the College address on Oct. 21.

MacKinnon’s style is lighthearted but is coupled with a forward thinking grasp of the pharmacy field and a decisiveness that continues to propel the college upward. 

He used the college’s new video "Let Me Tell You” (

linked here

) and recent Annual Report to guide the presentation.

Highlights from the address are:

• Through the efforts of MacKinnon, faculty and staff and the solid reputation of the college over the past two years, there has been a 7.5 percent increase in total enrollment:  491 students as of September 2015 compared to 457 in September 2013.

• The college is currently in the midst of the largest number of new hires in its history. Eight new faculty members have already on-boarded with recruitment of three more in the works.

• The college is soon to undergo Phase I of a $27 million renovation, with interior revisions estimated to be completed by summer 2016.

• After several years of deficits, the college has experienced surplus in each of the past two fiscal years, and it is projecting a budget surplus in the current fiscal year.

• The Winkle College of Pharmacy is ranked the No. 17 pharmacy graduate student program in the country by GraduatePrograms.com

• There has been an increase in the number of donors from 426 in 2013 to 527 in 2015, a 23 percent increase.

• In June 2015, the UC Board of Trustees voted to change the name of the Health Professions Building, where the college is located on Eden Avenue, to Joseph F. Kowalewski Hall  in honor of former Dean Kowalewski. The Dean Joseph Kowalewski Endowment Fund has accumulated more than $500,000.

• MacKinnon touched on research, citing many grant proposals in process, and the timeline of relocating most of the research faculty and their labs to newly renovated labs in the CARE/Crawley Building across the street.

The James L. Winkle College of Pharmacy, established in 1850, is the fourth oldest pharmacy school in the nation.