Good medicine New VCU pharmacy dean prepares students for a changing health care landscape

By Debora Timms

Now in its 125th year, the Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Pharmacy has seen countless number of graduates enter pharmacy careers and practices.

As the school’s newest dean, Kelechi C. Ogbonna, wants today’s students to be even more prepared to thrive as “leaders and change agents in an ever-evolving health care landscape.”

“Pharmacy touches every aspect of health care,” Dr. Ogbonna said in recent interviews with the Richmond Free Press.

“Our health care systems are fractured in many ways, but pharmacy can be part of filling in the gaps.”

That disparities that exist in the system was something Dr. Ogbonna said he came to understand at an early age. Born in Philadelphia to Nigerian parents, he grew up with his three younger sisters in South Jersey. During one of his grandfather’s occasional visits, he suffered a medical emergency.

“A medication misadventure had some serious consequences,” Dr. Ogbonna recalled. “It was implanted in me early on that while medications can have great benefits, they can also cause great problems.”

That memory surely played a role in his undergraduate choice of pre-pharmacy with a chemistry major at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey. After graduating in 2007, he entered the program at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences with the idea of becoming a community pharmacist. He soon learned that there were other opportunities within pharmacy, and decided that a residency would lead to other possibilities.

After completing his doctor of pharmacy in 2010, Dr. Ogbonna began a one-year pharmacy practice residency at West Haven VA Medical Center in Connecticut. He discovered his passion for geriatrics, staying another year to complete a geriatric pharmacy residency before coming to VCU as an assistant professor in 2012.

“I spent time at the VA and time at Yale. I was in the same city assessing two very different patient populations,” Dr. Ogbonna said. “[I saw how] health care looks very different depending on who you are and

Beleaguered foundation’s last member determined to maintain Black cemeteries, despite ongoing obstacles

By Jeremy M. Lazarus

The last board member of the collapsed Enrichmond Foundation is working to turn over to City Hall control of two historic Black cemeteries as well as other properties and assets still in the foundation’s name.

John H. Mitchell, a volunteer like the other resigned board members, stated that his goal is to have the city accept the assets, particularly Evergreen and East End cemeteries that date to the 1890s and border the city’s Oakwood Cemetery. He has taken on the role after joining the foundation in June 2021 as Evergreen’s first community ambassador. He became a board member a year later as the foundation

Mitchell