The field of pharmacy is constantly evolving and changing, with many new career paths opening up for pharmacists beyond conventional roles. Dalia Al Saeedy, a PharmD graduate from Gulf Medical University (GMU), decided to pursue a career in research and academia. She started from the PharmD to the Master’s in Drug Discovery and Development at GMU to the PhD at Virginia Commonwealth University.
During her time at GMU, Dalia explored multiple areas of pharmacy practice by training at Thumbay’s community pharmacy as well as Thumbay’s inpatient hospital pharmacy. She also spent her time assisting Dr. Ahmed Al-Abd in anti-cancer research in Thumbay Research Institute for Precision Medicine, which is where she discovered her passion for research.
The summer after her fourth year of PharmD, Dalia attended a six weeks-long research internship at GMU’s partner university, Virginia Commonwealth University, in Richmond, Virginia, USA. The internship served to further cement her interest in pursuing a career in research, so the following year Dalia enrolled in the Masters of Science in Drug Discovery and Development (MDD) program at GMU. In her second year of the MDD program, she submitted an abstract based off of her thesis project to the American Association for Cancer Research conference, and her abstract was subsequently accepted for a poster presentation at the 2022 conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, which she attended her with supervisor, Dr. Ahmed Al-Abd.
Ultimately, due to the connections she made during her internship at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) coupled with the research experience she gained during the MDD program; she was offered a PhD scholarship in Pharmacogenomics along with a graduate teaching assistantship at VCU for Fall 2022. Dalia is now currently located in Richmond, Virginia, USA, where she is attending VCU as a PhD student.
Dean Sherief Khalifa commented: “Our strategic partnership with Virginia Commonwealth University has been more than rewarding for our College of Pharmacy at GMU, our faculty and above all our students. Thank you to those who made it happen, Drs. Joesph DiPiro, David Holdford, Rucha Bond, Joseph McClay, Douglas Sweet, Phillip Gerk, Dave Dixon, Laura Frankart and many others.”
