For Immediate Release May 7, 1999
Contact: Alka Gupta, Helen Saffran 718-488-1015
Brooklyn, NY--Noted pharmaceutical scientist Leslie Benet will deliver the commencement address and receive an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Long Island University's Arnold & Marie Schwartz College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences on Friday, May 21 at 1 p.m.
Leslie Benet's colleagues say his greatest contribution to both education and science is the essential role he played in establishing the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS). He believes that as long as pharmaceutical scientists were part of the American Pharmaceutical Association (APhA), they would be viewed only as a part of pharmacy instead of being seen more accurately as working across all health-science disciplines. The result has been that to give the expertise of these researchers a more powerful voice in the development of drug regulatory policy.
Dr. Benet is professor and chairman of the department of pharmacy at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He has published significant discoveries in the areas of pharmacokinetics, drug metabolism, biopharmaceutics, pharmacodynamics and drugs specifically related to women's health. Most notably, he is among the first to identify the importance of the enzyme CYP3A in relation to menopause. He has served as a visiting professor at universities in Santiago, Chile; Sydney, Australia; Basel, Switzerland; and Tuebingen, Heidelberg and Frankfurt, Germany. He is a founder and editor of the Journal of Pharmacokinetics and Biopharmaceutics.
His many awards and honors include the APhA Academy of Pharmaceutical Sciences Research Achievement Award in Pharmaceutics, the Distinguished Service Award of the American College of Clinical Pharmacology, the Rho Chi Lecture Award and the UCSF School of Pharmacy's Long Teaching Award. He has published over 285 scientific articles and book chapters and has edited numerous books on pharmacokinetics and antiprogestins.
Benet's prolific writing may reflect part of his past. He earned a B.A. in English at the University of Michigan and began graduate studies in creative writing, only to be told by a professor that he would never succeed as a poet. He thereupon earned his B.S. in Pharmacy and M.S. in pharmaceutical chemistry from the University of Michigan and his Ph.D. in pharmaceutical chemistry from the University of California. He lives in Marin County with his wife Carol.
One of the largest schools of its kind in the country, the Arnold & Marie Schwartz College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, on Long Island University's Brooklyn Campus, educates nearly one third of the pharmacists in New York State and many who find careers elsewhere. The school recently added Pharm.D. and Ph.D. degrees to its curriculum.
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