The two Northeastern professors were honored for their contributions through research and service.
Northeastern University clinical professor Margarita DiVall and professor emeritus David Zgarrick recently received prestigious awards from the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy.
DiVall, senior associate dean for faculty affairs and belonging at Northeastern, was honored with the Rufus A. Lyman Award for her paper “A National Survey of Perceptions Around Conditions Associated with Pharmacy Faculty Workload Equity,” which appeared in the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education.
Zgarrick received the Distinguished Service Award, which recognizes an individual who provided “exemplary service to AACP and academic pharmacy.”
The Rufus A. Lyman Award bestowed on DiVall is given annually to authors of the best paper published that year in the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education.
The paper DiVall helped author looks at the perception of workload of faculty from 145 colleges around the country.
“Faculty workload is an issue of much interest and debate,” DiVall said. “Faculty have to do teaching, service, scholarship, and research, which you think would be easy enough to measure because it’s numbers of courses and students. But it can be interpreted very differently. One of the most challenging things about workload is a perception of equity.”
The group of authors conducted the study via a survey to faculty members who are members of the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, asking them about their workload and what the faculty members felt about this workload in terms of equity.
DiVall said they received 662 responses that the team then analyzed. What they found was that faculty wanted more transparency in terms of workload assignment, illustrating the value of institutions having workload policies that contain elements of transparency.
“Transparency was really important in terms of having an impact on perceptions of equity,” DiVall said. “Developing trust between the leadership and the faculty (also) helps enhance productivity and accountability.”
Zgarrick was recognized as an individual who provided “exemplary service to AACP and academic pharmacy.”
Zgarrick first became involved with the AACP while attending graduate school and has served various roles over the years at AACP, including on the AACP Board of Directors as the Chair of the Council of Faculties, the Chair of the Council of Sections and as treasurer for a total of 11 years.
Zgarrick has served in various roles in the school of pharmacy at Northeastern as both a professor and administrator, including serving as acting dean in the school of pharmacy and associate dean for faculty in Bouve College. He retired from Northeastern in 2022.
Zgarrick spent much of his career teaching and researching the business management side of pharmacy.
“I (helped) future pharmacists understand that in order to provide good care to patients, you actually have to run a business that takes good care of patients,” he said. “I help them understand the business side.”