Student Voices: 2024 Pharmaceutical Sciences Research & Graduate Education Retreat

PhD candidate, Henry Dieckhaus, shares the insider experience of this annual event

Story by Henry Dieckhaus | photo by Ryan McDaniel | Published March 12, 2024

Student Voices gives first-person perspectives written by the students of the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy. For this piece, we get the insider experience of the annual Pharmaceutical Sciences Research & Graduate Education Retreat from PhD candidate, Henry Dieckhaus.

As a second-year PhD student in the Pharmaceutical Sciences program, I spend nearly all of my time conducting the research that will eventually comprise my thesis. As a result, there are few fixed appointments on my calendar, with the exception of the occasional group meeting or journal club. Most days, I am left to my own devices to plan experiments, analyze results, and catch up on recent publications. Today, however, is not most days.

Today, March 1st,  2024, is the day of the annual Pharmaceutical Sciences Research & Graduate Education Retreat. For one day each spring, students and faculty from all corners of the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy come together to learn from one another and to celebrate our collective achievements.

Although the retreat runs all day, I actually have another mission this morning – recruitment! Along with other first- and second-year students, I have been asked to serve as a “student host” for our incoming class of admitted students. In this role, we escort our guests around campus and answer questions about the student experience. To that end, I meet the recruits for breakfast at 8am, where we are given a brief introduction to UNC from Dr. Mike Jarstfer, our Assistant Dean for Graduate Education. I have now heard this presentation three times, and I always find it helpful to be reminded of all the useful resources we have available here on campus.

By 9:30, we’re sent out on lab tours. This cross-campus odyssey takes us through several of the crown jewels of the Eshelman School of Pharmacy research portfolio, including the Center for Integrated Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery (CICBDD) and the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC). This is the closest that I get to a scavenger hunt in my day-to-day life, so I always enjoy the chance to see labs that I don’t necessarily get to visit as part of my research duties.

Around lunchtime, we finally make our way to the Pharmaceutical Sciences retreat, which has been in full swing since 8:30 this morning. We prefer to schedule our recruitment concurrently with the retreat in order to allow our prospective new colleagues the opportunity to engage with the community and to witness the cutting-edge research we have on display. Whereas the morning program at the retreat included several “big picture” items such as the keynote address and a career development panel, the afternoon begins with a focused research blitz, with several rapid-fire research talks sandwiched between poster sessions. For my cohort of recruits, this is a golden opportunity to learn more about labs they may be interested in pursuing during first-year rotations. Meanwhile, this afternoon gives me a chance to connect with several colleagues from co-curricular organizations that I had never engaged with in a research setting.

Later in the afternoon, we receive some updates from School-wide initiatives including CERSI and AViDD, followed by some thoughtful remarks from Dean Angela Kashuba. One common theme for the afternoon is the power of collaboration. The AViDD project, for example, demonstrates how expertise in various aspects of early-stage drug discovery can be combined to enable discovery of new prospective antivirals. As someone who was briefly involved in one small part of the AViDD initiative during first-year rotations, it makes me proud to see how much progress has been made in such a short time.

The final item on the agenda is an awards ceremony led by Dr. Jarstfer and Dr. Kim Brouwer, who begin by recognizing individual students and postdocs for their exceptional presentations throughout the day. This is followed by an almost comically long list of fellowships from external organizations such as NSF, NIH, and ACS, which serves to emphasize once more the exceptional quality of training provided here at the School.

With that final punctuation mark, the retreat wraps up for the day. Afterward, my fellow student hosts and I will be taking our recruits to a banquet at the Carolina Inn, where we can all relax and decompress after a long day of tours and presentations. This has been perhaps the busiest day of the year for me and many others, and yet… I can’t wait to do it all again next year!