April 18, 2018
By Whitney Tarpy
JACKSON, Miss. – University of Mississippi fourth-year student pharmacists Austin Morrison and Taylor Loper will have their research poster displayed at the Rowland Medical Library in April after winning the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s Research Poster Competition for March.
Morrison’s and Loper’s winning poster is titled “Impact of Total Body Weight on Clinical Outcomes of Obese Patients Treated with Beta-Iactams.” The UM School of Pharmacy students focused their research on how two common hospital antibiotics, ceftriaxone and cefepime, affect the body in obese versus non-obese patients.
“With this research, we hope to provide clinical data about the health outcomes of obese patients compared with non-obese patients when treated with package insert dosing,” Morrison said.
Morrison, from Ridgeland, Mississippi, and Loper, of Olive Branch, Mississippi, presented their poster at the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists Midyear Clinical Meeting last December. The duo’s work is not complete, as Morrison and Loper are collecting and analyzing more data to write an abstract to submit to the 2018 Infectious Diseases Society of America IDWeek, an international meeting taking place in October.
“Austin’s and Taylor’s hard work and dedication made this research possible,” said Jamie Wagner, clinical assistant professor at the School of Pharmacy. “They collaborated to complete every aspect of the research process and are seeing it through to presentation and publication. We are very proud of them.”
Both the student pharmacists’ interest in infectious diseases allowed them to match with postgraduate residency programs next year. Morrison will head to the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan, while Loper will be at Baptist Memorial Hospital-North Mississippi in Oxford.