I received my Pharm.D. from the UCSF School of Pharmacy in 1967 and then spent two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Micronesia. I was among the first clinical pharmacists at UCSF, where I established the first community-based clinical clerkships. During the 1970s and 1980s, I co-edited the first three editions of a textbook, "Applied Therapeutics: The Clinical Use of Drugs." I wrote a mass-market book for older people, Prescription Drugs (1989). My post-doctoral fellowship at the Alcohol Research Group in Berkeley (1991-3) resulted in two peer-reviewed papers about the history of medical knowledge about alcohol, one of them the lead paper with invited commentaries in "Addiction," concerned the immediate post-repeal era; the other, in the "American Journal of Public Health," spans the entire U.S. experience with alcohol up to 1993. More recently, I wrote another textbook "MEDLINE: a guide to effective searching in PubMed & other interfaces" (2009). From 1993 to 2009, I was a clinical pharmacist at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, where I established pharmacy services for the network of community-based primary care clinics and subsequently become the first public health pharmacist, working as deputy director of the prevention branch. Working with Tomas Aragon, MD, DrPH, and Randy Reiter, MPH, PhD, I contributed to assessments of population health in San Francisco. My particular interest was in linking mortality outcomes with risk factors. This work resulted in two peer-reviewed papers: "Calculating expected years of life lost for assessing local ethnic disparities in causes of premature death" and "Estimating alcohol-related premature mortality in San Francisco: use of population-attributable fractions from the global burden of disease study." I am in the midst of writing a book that places drug therapy within the broader context of population health. I believe that looking at the intersection of drug therapy and public health through the lens of the history of science will illuminate our current understanding and help us plan for the future.
Listed skills include Program Evaluation, Grant Writing, Qualitative Research, Health Education, and 11 others.
