Author: [AUTHOR] Published on 9/1/2026 12:00:00 AM
Sonya C. Tang Girdwood, MD, PhD, Associate Professor, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, Ohio
What does being the 2026 Leon I Goldberg Early Investigator Award Recipient mean to you?
For me, the Leon I. Goldberg Early Investigator Award is a reflection of the incredible investment my mentors put in me and a recognition of the amazing research that my team, primarily made up of trainees, has accomplished. I would not be in the field of clinical pharmacology without my PhD mentor, Theresa Shapiro, MD, PhD, who first introduced me to the field and gave me the opportunity to attend my first ASCPT conference in 2008 as a graduate student. Seeing how pharmacology at the bench could translate into medicines in humans was highly appealing to me as a future physician-scientist. I am also grateful for the strong pharmacology education I received as a medical student at Johns Hopkins, from clinical pharmacologists like Drs. Shapiro and Craig Hendrix, who also received an award at the ASCPT 2026 Annual Meeting. I graduated with my MD and PhD from Hopkins, knowing I wanted to pursue research in clinical pharmacology, and was fortunate to do my residency training at Cincinnati Children's, where I met Alexander Vinks, PharmD, PhD, another award recipient at the ASCPT 2026 Annual Meeting. He taught me how to be a champion of clinical pharmacology research and its application to patients. He and my clinical research mentor, Jennifer Kaplan, MD, helped me turn my research into a successful research program of building evidence for beta-lactam antibiotic precision dosing in critically ill children. I have been incredibly fortunate to mentor very talented fellows, Kathryn Pavia, MD, Kelli Paice, MD, H. Rhodes Hambrick, MD, Ronald Morales Junior, PhD, and Shannon Reinert, MD, who have been wildly productive in research like acute care nephrology and neonatology. They took a chance on being mentored by a junior faculty member, and without them, I would not have made nearly as many research accomplishments.
As the 2026 SPC Chair, what was your favorite part about the ASCPT 2026 Annual Meeting?
My favorite part was seeing the high engagement with the concept of Pharmacoequity by our attendees. I still remember when we first revealed the theme of “Advancing Pharmacoequity” in the spring of 2025 and hosted a webinar, there were a lot of questions about what pharmacoequity was and how it applied to translational and clinical pharmacology across the DDRU spectrum and how many research abstracts also addressed pharmacoequity. Hearing the inspiring conversations around pharmacoequity during the meeting was a joy.
What has been your favorite aspect of working with the Scientific Program Committee?
My favorite part has been the people on the Scientific Program Committee (SPC). Our SPC members are highly dedicated to ensuring the best possible programming at each Annual Meeting. They invest so much time in reviewing proposals and abstracts. When extra tasks need to be done, like coming up with titles of sessions or moderating sessions, they jump in without hesitation. I am particularly grateful for Mohamed Shahin, PhD, who was the SPC chair before me, for his guidance and constant willingness to help.
Who has inspired you in your career?
My absolute favorite part of my career is being able to mentor others and to instill a joy for research in them. I am so grateful to my prior research mentors who have inspired me and have modeled great mentorship for me. However, it was about a year ago, when I was preparing the eulogy for my father's funeral, that I realized my innate love for mentorship came from my father, who was a chemist. I reflected on his love for teaching others, never hesitating to pull out a napkin at the dinner table to teach my friends and me a chemical reaction, and now I do that with my trainees, but with Post-it notes and concentration-vs-time curves. He actually went into academia in his 60's after he retired from industry. He worked in a university lab in China 6 months out of the year and loved that he was able to mentor graduate students. He was so devoted to them and found ways to provide feedback and mentorship to them when he was back in the US, and we were in the pre-Zoom days.
How do you keep focused and motivated?
What I love about clinical pharmacology is the direct application to patients. So, what keeps me focused and motivated when things get challenging is remembering why we do what we do is ultimately, to help patients. Even if we are helping only one patient at a time with our n=1 precision dosing methods, for that patient and their family, what we are doing is invaluable. While it can be hard to balance a career as a physician and a scientist, it is deeply important to me to continue to practice clinically, both to understand the pharmacology challenges at the bedside and to see new clinical pharmacology advances being applied at the bedside.
Dr. Tang Girdwood has been a member of ASCPT since 2017.
