Author: [AUTHOR] Published on 11/2/2020 8:05:00 AM

Ethan Poweleit, Graduate Assistant, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH

Ethan is a second‐year Biomedical Informatics doctoral student at the University of Cincinnati and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. He began working in the Division of Clinical Pharmacology at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital while he was completing his Bachelor’s degree at Northern Kentucky University. He worked as a summer student with Dr. Laura Ramsey. After graduating in 2019, he joined the University of Cincinnati’s Biomedical Informatics Doctoral Program where he continues to work with Dr. Ramsey. Ethan appreciates Dr. Ramsey’s role in his own career: “Dr. Ramsey continues to be a supportive mentor and advocate for me, and her insightful and ingenious leadership has been invaluable in my training.”

Pharmacogenomics is Ethan’s particular area of interest. He learned about the area during his undergraduate education at Northern Kentucky University. After learning about pharmacogenomics, he applied for, and received, the summer fellowship program at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital with Dr. Ramsey. That program was enlightening to him and opened his eyes to how this can benefit the quality of care for patients. Now the goal of his research is to understand how pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic genes influence psychotropic medication exposure, response, and adverse effects in children and adolescents with psychiatric disorders. Ultimately, we hope to optimize treatment outcomes for pediatric patients by providing the right medication in the right dose at the right time.

Up to now, pharmacogenetic studies have largely focused on adults, whereas the relationship between variants in these genes and treatment outcomes in pediatric patients are not as well understood. To this end, Ethan and his colleagues have showed that pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic genes contribute to the variability in treatment outcomes of youth with psychiatric disorders and that they could potentially benefit from pharmacogenetically‐guided dosing “through the clinical champions that work with us, we have seen and heard how pharmacogenetics in practice has impacted clinical decision making and benefitted patient care.”

Ethan joined ASCPT when he submitted an abstract to the ASCPT 2020 Annual Meeting. He was looking forward to being able to connect and network with other scientists and leaders in the fields of clinical pharmacology and translational science at the conference and is looking forward to taking advantage of these opportunities during the ASCPT 2021 Annual Meeting. He believes that ASCPT will continue to serve as a cornerstone to his career development both as a student and as a scientist. He looks forward to understanding how researchers grow and scale their projects across the field. He has already taken advantage of the webinars and some of the other educational events offered by ASCPT, and he plans to continue to utilize these resources.

Dr. Poweleit was recognized as an ASCPT Presidential Trainee in 2020.