Bies appointed associate dean for Graduate Education

In this newly established role, Bies will bring leadership to the PhD programming at the University at Buffalo (UB) School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences (SPPS). His primary responsibility will be growing our PhD programming and associated areas involving recruitment, budgeting and governance.

Bies will oversee all aspects of our on-site graduate programs and will advance the impact of our on-line MS programming. He will lead the division directors of Graduate Studies in managing our Pharmaceutical Sciences PhD and MS programs, the Pharmacometrics and Personalized Pharmacotherapy and the Clinical and Translational Therapeutics MS programs and will also lead the Office for Graduate Education.

“This is a very unique time at the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences with significant growth and evolution of the graduate programs encompassing the PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences and the MS degrees in Pharmaceutical Sciences, Pharmacometrics and Personalized Pharmacotherapy and Clinical and Translational Therapeutics,” says Bies.

Bies earned his PharmD from the University of Texas at Austin and University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio in 1994 and his PhD Pharmacology degree from Georgetown University in 1998. He then went on to complete postdoctoral training at Georgetown University in the Center for Drug Development Sciences until 2000. From 2000-2009 he served as an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy. He went on to serve as associate professor of Medicine and Medical and Molecular Genetics at the Indiana University School of Medicine and as director of the Disease and Therapeutic Response Modeling program for the Indiana Clinical Translational Sciences Institute from 2009-2015. 

In 2015 Bies joined SPPS and currently serves as a professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences. He is also a member of the UB Institute for Computational Data Science. Bies additionally serves as a project scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, University of Toronto, is on the editorial boards for numerous scientific journals and is a member of several national scientific organizations.

His research focuses on the application of pharmacometric approaches in HIV, addiction, psychiatry, oncology, and neurology and novel methods development including machine learning approaches to model selection and optimization methods for parameter optimization in dynamic systems.

“I am delighted to have the opportunity to engage in this role,” Bies adds. “I look forward to working with my colleagues and the Dean to shepherd the graduate programs through this period of significant change.”