The Department of Pharmacology
History and status quo
The Department of Pharmacology started offering master's degree program in the early 1980s and the scientific research in the department pioneered by the late Prof. Zhangwen Li also initiated at the same time. In 1990s, the department made great strides in its research activity under the lead of Prof. Renxiu Peng and several other senior scientists. Since early 2000s, the department has seen younger generations of talented scientists and teachers, with Prof. Hui Wang at the forefront, come forth to take on active and pivotal roles that have expedited the academic development and broadened the research horizon of the department. Present faculty includes 4 professors, 7 associate professors, 2 lecturers and 2 teaching assistants, among whom there are 5 doctoral supervisors and 10 supervisors for Master’s theses. Current main research directions within the department include identification of targets for drug action & drug development, developmental toxicity of xenobiotics, anticancer drug research & development, research & evaluation of new drugs, drug metabolism & safety evaluation, nanopharmacology & nanotoxicology, and drug screening & toxicity research. Seventy one research projects in this department have received funding at various levels totaling 20743000 Yuan (RMB) since 2005. These include 2 NSFC key program grant, 1 NSFC major program grant, 1 MOE major program grant, and 28 NSFC general program grants. Scientific research of the department has yielded 115 papers published in high impact international academic journals (science citation indexed) and 16 authorized patents. Research achievements of the department have been critically acclaimed and won such awards as” the third prize of Hubei Province Scientific and Technological Progress Award” and “second prize of Wuhan Science and Technology Progress Award ”. The department started running joint doctoral programs in early 1990s. As of now, 32 doctoral students and 100 master program students have completed their study/training and graduated. In 2011, under the approval by the MOE, the department began to run an independent doctoral program in Drug Toxicology and award doctoral degrees. In 2013, Wuhan University received a world excellence ranking of 395 (world top 1%) in the discipline of Pharmacology & Toxicology to which this department is a major contributor.
Pharmacology of this department is a “Key Discipline of Hubei Province”. This department offers pharmacology course, which is among the “Elite Courses of Hubei Province”, to undergraduate students in clinical medicine, oral medicine, nursing and medical laboratory specialty. We also offer pharmacology courses to students of master’s degree programs and continuing education programs. Since 2005, the department has been awarded 19 medical education research grants of provincial and ministerial levels. Faculty members have been chief editors or editorial members of 15 scholarly monographs and textbooks and published more than 20 education research papers. Through the years, we have been endeavoring to reform the undergraduate teaching, particularly to foster an exploratory manner of lab learning. These efforts, summarized in the project “Exploratory mode of lab teaching in basic medical education: construction and practice” have achieved influential results that won the prize of “Outstanding Teaching Achievement Award of Wuhan University” in 2006 and the second prize of “Teaching Achievement Award of Hubei Province” in 2009. In the same year, we were entitled “A national level teaching team of medical function experiment”.
This department has a well-equipped hardware platform for research and teaching. Our teaching lab became "A qualified teaching laboratory for basic courses in higher learning” in 1999. Our research lab was approved as “National Level-3 Research Laboratory for Traditional Chinese Medicine” in 2000 and promoted to “National Level-2 Research Laboratory for Traditional Chinese Medicine” in 2002. In 2003, our lab became part of the “Wuhan University Non-clinical Drug Research Center”, which was in 2009 further reorganized into “Wuhan University Center for Food and Drug Evaluation and Research”. In 2014, the “Hubei Provincial Key Laboratory of Developmentally Originated Disease” was founded. New research directions have thereafter developed from this platform and some work has yielded results with international impact.