Historic Win for PHOP Students

UHCOP Team Claims ISPOR Research Competition's First Repeat Title; Alumni Earn Research Poster Awards

A UH College of Pharmacy team of doctoral program students secured a place in history with the first-ever back-to-back titles in the quiz-bowl style international research competition May 21 in Boston, Mass.

The team comprising Carmine Colavecchia, Pharm.D., M.S. ('14), BCPS; Navneet Upadhyay, M.S. ('14); Aisha Vadhariya; and Qingqing Xu, M.S., won the Student Research Competition at the International Society of Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) 22nd Annual International Meeting. 

The competition features an academic "quiz-bowl" style format in which questions from the official ISPOR Book of Terms and ISPOR Good Research Practices for Outcomes Research are posed to teams in head-to-head competition. The first team to hit the buzzer and provide the correct answer receives points, but wrong answers – or even attempting to answer before being recognized – results in deduction of points.

The competition, now in its 12th year, is open to teams advancing from an initial qualifying round from the nearly 90 ISPOR student chapters around the world.

In addition to the student win, two UHCOP alumni also brought home awards from the ISPOR research poster competitions.

Pratik Rane, MBA, Ph.D. ('16), who works as Global Health Economics Manager at Amgen, was one of three recipients of the Best Student Research Poster awards. Rane's presentation, entitled "Risk of Clostridium Difficile Infection Associated with Proton Pump Inhibitor Use Among Community Dwelling Adults with Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease," was coauthored by UTHealth McGovern Medical School gastroenterologist Sushovan Guha, M.D., Ph.D., and UHCOP faculty members Kevin W. Garey, M.S., Pharm.D., FASHP; Hua Chen, M.D., Ph.D.; Michael L. Johnson, Ph.D., and Rajender Aparasu, Ph.D., FAPhA.

Sandipan Bhattacharjee, Ph.D., M.S. ('10), an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, was one of three recipients of the Best New Investigator Poster Research Presentation Awards. Bhattacharjee's project was entitled "Healthcare Expenditures Among Community-Dwelling Adults with Thyroid Cancer in the United States: A Propensity Score Matched Analysis." His coauthors were UA post-doctoral pharmacy fellows Moteb Khobrani, Pharm.D., and Ziyad Alrabiah, Pharm.D.; UA medical student Jawad Bilal, MBBS; and UA Ph.D. student Irbaz bin Riaz.