Dr. Albert Wertheimer was a Fulbright Specialist during the first half of December, 2022 at the Hasannuddin University School of Pharmacy in Makassar, Indonesia.

The Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Hasanuddin (UNHAS) and Dr. Albert Wertheimer, Professor of Pharmacy at Nova Southeastern University, had successfully carried out a capacity-building project on social and administrative pharmacy study. The project ran for two weeks, from the end of November to mid-December 2022, in Makassar.

Dr. Wertheimer said that he had a wonderful two-week program with the UNHAS School of Pharmacy in Makassar, Indonesia.

“Everyone went out of their way to make my specialist program successful. I had access to reports, documents, and people as requested, including members of the higher university administration”, he said.

The most immediate product of this endeavor was a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that his U.S. institution would sign to create a sister school arrangement to facilitate the exchange of faculty members and students.

“I have shared my knowledge and experience with my colleagues at UNHAS along with an offer to collaborate or help in any way possible in the future,” he further said.

“In fact, I have already begun a joint research project with a UNHAS faculty member in the area of the economic cost of drug product counterfeiting,” he added.

Dr. Wertheimer will also serve as a matchmaker in the future if a pharmaceutics professor wants to contact a peer at my home institution or elsewhere in the USA. He had shown the faculty at UNHAS what a full social and administrative pharmacy department looked like and what resources it required for both a Pharm.D. program as well as for an M.S. and PhD program.

“I have explained a rationale for the U.S. pharmacy curriculum, and it is now up to them to decide if they wish to modify their chemistry and physical science-oriented curriculum more toward a patient focus,” he asserted.

He further said that he believed that UNHAS would be a leader in progressive pharmacy education and research in the not-too-distant future.