Peter H. O’Donnell, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine and Deputy Director of the Center for Personalized Therapeutics, as chair of the Committee on Clinical Pharmacology & Pharmacogenomics, effective January 1, 2022.
O’Donnell is a translational researcher with advanced training in clinical pharmacology and pharmacogenomics and a practicing medical oncologist specializing in the treatment of genitourinary malignancies, specifically bladder cancer. His research focuses on facilitating and understanding the delivery and adoption of germline genetic markers that predict drug response and he is especially interested in assessing whether the critical mass of clinically actionable germline pharmacogenomic information can be utilized in practice if barriers to implementation can be overcome.
O’Donnell graduated from the University of Notre Dame prior to medical school at the University of Chicago. He completed his residency in Internal Medicine followed by two fellowships at UChicago in Hematology/Oncology and Clinical Pharmacology and Pharmacogenomics. He is the Chair of the Pharmacogenomics and Population Pharmacology Committee of The Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology, a member of the editorial board for Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, and serves on the American Board of Clinical Pharmacology.
As chair of the Committee on Clinical Pharmacology & Pharmacogenomics, O’Donnell will take the place of Eileen Dolan, PhD, Professor of Medicine, who chaired the committee for the past 12 years. During her tenure, the training program flourished and is now considered one of the premier Clinical Therapeutics training programs in the U.S. She increased the number of training slots in the program with support from the NIH, the BSD, the Comprehensive Cancer Center, and an industry partnership with AbbVie, and expanded it to include PhD, PharmD/PhD, and MD trainees.
One of Dolan’s priorities was to bring together people with different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, scientific expertise, working styles and perspectives. As a result, she dramatically improved diversity among trainees with 40% of the current fellows from populations under-represented in the sciences. The majority of fellows completing the program have since moved on to distinguished careers in academic medicine, industry or the FDA.
