Winter named Distinguished Alumnus of the Year

Michael E. Winter, PharmD, professor emeritus of clinical pharmacy, UCSF School of Pharmacy, has been selected as the 2009 recipient of the UCSF Pharmacy Alumni Association's Distinguished Alumnus of the Year award. In announcing the award, UCSF Alumni Association President Cooky Quandt, PharmD, noted that “Dr. Winter was an extraordinary candidate and received a unanimous vote of the Board of Governors.”

Winter is well known as a pioneer in the establishment of clinical pharmacokinetics, which is the complex science that determines the optimum drug doses for individual patients. As America's first pharmacist clinical pharmacokineticist, he published extensively on the subject and addressed professional pharmacy forums worldwide, urging the profession to adopt clinical pharmacokinetics as an important role.

He continues to have a major impact on pharmacists and schools of pharmacy in the U.S. and abroad through the textbook Basic Clinical Pharmacokinetics, which he authored and published. This first-of-its-kind resource is now in its 5th edition. Winter had an “international impact on the field of pharmacokinetics and health consulting,” states Shigehiko Shimada, a professor at Kitasato University, Japan.

Winter's credits include not only the establishment of clinical pharmacokinetics but also his career-long service as an inspirational teacher and clinician for generations of UCSF student pharmacists. He was also an early innovator at UCSF in the 1970s of clinical pharmacy, which is a practitioner role in which the pharmacist assumes responsibility as a member of the drug therapy decision-making team. Although clinical pharmacy was then considered to be a radical departure from the traditional practice of pharmacy, it has now become mainstream practice in the U.S. and around the world.

Winter earned a PharmD from the UCSF School of Pharmacy in 1970 and joined the faculty that same year. He served as vice chair for academic affairs in the School's department of clinical pharmacy from 1984 until he retired in 2007.

Winter will receive the Distinguished Alumnus Award for 2009 at the annual UCSF School of Pharmacy Homecoming on November 7, 2009 in San Francisco.