Final School of Pharmacy dean candidate to present March 13
Editor's note March 11: This candidate visit has been updated. The original visit was scheduled for Feb. 24.
Editor's note Feb. 21: This candidate visit has been postponed.
LAWRENCE — David Dietz will be the final candidate for the dean of the School of Pharmacy position to visit the University of Kansas Lawrence campus and share his vision for the school.
His public presentation will take place 4-5 p.m. March 13 in Room 1020 of the School of Pharmacy building. The event will also be livestreamed, and the passcode is 932064.
Dietz is a professor and chair of the Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology as well as the associate dean of research strategy at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo in Buffalo, New York.
Members of the KU community are encouraged to attend each presentation and provide feedback to the search committee. Presentation recordings and the online feedback form will remain available on the search page through March 18.
Additional search information, including Dietz’s CV, is also available on the search page.
As chair of the pharmacology and toxicology department, Dietz oversees two undergraduate majors, two master’s programs and two doctoral programs. He founded the school’s undergraduate program in neurosciences, and he has also helped develop and implement a medical school curriculum that utilizes an integrated approach to prepare students for developing challenges in the modern health care field.
Dietz’s research has focused on understanding how molecular and behavioral plasticity in the brain mediates the susceptibility of individuals to drug abuse and relapse. He is principal investigator on multiple NIH grants to study heroin- and cocaine-induced changes in the brain during addiction.
Dietz trains several postdoctoral fellows and graduate students in his lab, where they have received a number of awards and independent funding.
In addition, Dietz has been recognized as a UB Exceptional Scholar, both as a Young Investigator in 2015 and for Sustained Achievement in 2023. Dietz is also a member or the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, Society for Neuroscience and American Association for the Advancement of Science. He previously served as the president of his local chapter for the Society for Neuroscience.
Dietz earned his doctorate in neuroscience from Florida State University and his bachelor’s degree in psychology from Rutgers University. He additionally was a postdoctoral fellow in the Friedman Brain Institute at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.