UNC schools team up for dual degree

Two of UNC’s most prestigious schools are teaming up to give students the chance to earn high honors in both of the programs.

Thanks to a student-initiated partnership, UNC’s Eshelman School of Pharmacy and Gillings School of Global Public Health will allow students to complete both a doctorate degree in pharmacy and a master’s degree in public health in just five years.

The program will be open to second-year pharmacy students beginning in fall 2014.

The program will allow students to graduate with a master’s in public health in just one additional year rather than the two years it would take to earn the degree separately.

Both schools ranked number two in their fields by the most recent U.S. News & World Report rankings of their respective fields.

Pharmacy student Erin Turingan initiated the idea last year by conducting an interest survey in each of her classes.

“There was an overwhelming response for it,” she said.

Turingan then gathered a committee of about five students to research the public health and pharmacy sectors and analyze the role of the dual-degree program within the existing curriculum.

Committee member Deanna Wung helped Turingan finalize the proposal for the project and present it to a board of administrators.

Wung said the program would encourage collaboration between pharmacists and public health professionals — something that would make the healthcare system more efficient.

“There is a lot of potential for collaboration between health care providers and public health professionals, especially in the crisis of high health care costs,” Wung said.

After getting the thumbs-up from the pharmacy school, Wung and Turingan went on to secure the support of the School of Public Health.

Turingan said Assistant Dean of the Pharmacy School Wendy Cox and pharmacy professor Timothy Ives were champions of her cause.

Cox said the dual degree will allow candidates to combine a pharmacist’s skill for case-by-case patient interaction and treatment with a public health professional’s sense of the big picture of disease control and health management. She said the degree requirements have not changed.

“They will be the same rigorous programs they were before combining the two,” Cox said.

Because there is some overlap in the classes taken, students can take full advantage of that overlap and graduate in less time, Cox said.

She expects five to 10 people to apply to the program for its first graduating class of 2017.

Wung said the schools were very helpful in facilitating the change, though the different organizational structure of the two schools made it difficult for them to integrate.

Ives, who graduated from a similar dual-degree program in the 1980s, said it allows an invaluable combination of perspectives that will make graduates successful.

“Be sure to keep an eye on the candidates who decide to pursue this option, as they will be the leaders of the future, in pharmacy and in their own communities.”

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