Chapman University School of Pharmacy Dean Ron Jordan
Ronald P. Jordan, R. Ph., FAPhA, has been named founding dean of Chapman University’s new School of Pharmacy, which is planning to admit its first class in fall 2015.   Jordan will assume his new duties at Chapman in February 2013 and will establish the first pharmacy school in Orange County on Chapman’s new Health Sciences Campus in Irvine when renovations are completed this year.

Jordan previously served as dean of the College of Pharmacy at the
University of Rhode Island
and as executive secretary of the
Rhode Island State Crime Lab Commission
.  At URI, he oversaw completion of construction on his college’s $75 million research and teaching facility.  During his tenure at URI, enrollment in the pharmacy program increased 45 percent.  The URI College of Pharmacy ranked among the top research-oriented colleges of pharmacy in the U.S., with federally funded research exceeding a five-year average of nearly $9 million per year, a one-third period-to-period increase.

“Dean Jordan comes to Chapman with a distinguished background in his profession, and with a remarkable record of innovation and leadership in the interdisciplinary development of health professionals, and pharmacists in particular,” said Daniele Struppa, Ph.D., chancellor of Chapman University.   “Under Dean Jordan’s aegis we intend to educate the new generation of pharmacists – a profession that is in extremely high demand in California and nationwide – with training in the newest and most vital areas of expertise, including genetics and personalized medicine, biologics, biopharmaceuticals, and the very latest in medication and care delivery.  He is an accomplished entrepreneur as well as a pharmacy leader, with both business development and health informatics expertise.  We are very excited to have Dean Jordan on board as Chapman embarks on this next phase of our Health Sciences initiative.”

Chapman’s Health Sciences Campus, purchased in 2012 for $20 million, is comprised of two large former research-and-development buildings in the Irvine Spectrum.  The new campus provides Chapman with 166,000 square feet of space and ample parking, which will allow the university to significantly expand its multi-disciplinary health sciences programs.  Chapman will invest another $24 million in renovations to the buildings to accommodate its health science classes, which will include the physical therapy doctoral program, one of the nation’s oldest and most respected, and the new School of Pharmacy.  Chancellor Struppa said that more programs will be added later, including a physician’s assistant program, “always with an eye to which health fields are in most demand in California and throughout the U.S.”

“I look forward to guiding Chapman’s new School of Pharmacy,” said Jordan.  “Its location in Irvine, among a constellation of biopharmaceutical and medical-device industry innovators, represents a unique opportunity for potential industry collaboration and professional development. Pharmacists practicing in the very near future will face challenges in medication management and delivery that are impossible to envision clearly today.  The next-generation drugs are biologics, made by actual living cells rather than synthesis with chemicals like many of today’s medicines.  By 2014, six of the top ten drugs used in the U.S. will be biologics.  Our future pharmacists will need to be the expert sources of deep scientific knowledge on how these drugs work.  Our school will train these professionals to interpret and put into practice the massive amount of data generated on this subject, preparing them for a continually changing profession whose boundaries are growing almost day by day.”

Chapman is uniquely positioned to become a significant partner with these industries, Jordan explained.  He added that Chapman’s School of Pharmacy will interact with and benefit from the other developing and current health professional training programs to be housed on the new campus in Irvine, and the university’s other science programs on the main campus.  “We’ll be able to capitalize on the highly qualified faculty and the current work in health professions training, health informatics and biological sciences being carried out in Irvine and in Orange.”

Under Jordan’s leadership, the University of Rhode Island’s College of Pharmacy was awarded one of the federal government’s highly competitive Center for Medicaid and Medicare Innovation grants, totaling more than $14 million over three years. He serves on executive advisory boards for that grant.  He also helped establish a new bachelor of science in pharmaceutical sciences program in the college, and oversaw the advancement of graduate research program funding as well as global research and education partnerships.  He also increased fund-raising for the college by 50 percent.

Before coming to URI, Jordan founded businesses in hospice and pain management pharmacy, health benefit management software and integrated health systems informatics consulting.  He also served as a senior executive at companies offering such products as an online consumer prescription marketplace, a pharmaceutical product supply chain transformation tools, and insurance through a major national health benefits firm.

Jordan earned his bachelor of science in pharmacy at URI in 1976, and studied for three years in a doctoral program in pharmaceutics.  He is a former president of the American Pharmacists Association (APhA), a fellow of the APhA Academy of Pharmacy Practice, a member of the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, and served as trustee and standardization chairman of the National Council for Prescription Drug Programs (NCPDP).  He was instrumental in developing the pharmacy profession’s current patient-centered medication therapy management standards, as well as the health informatics standards that form the foundation of prescription benefit coverage and administration.   He led NCPDP’s effort to gain American National Standards Institute approval of operating procedures for consensus standards development in pharmacy.

Jordan currently serves on the U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention Medicare Model Guidelines Expert Panel, and the national advisory committee for the Alliance for Safe Biological Medicines.  He previously served as one of two pharmacists on the Health Care Financing Administration’s Medicare Coverage Advisory Committee Panel on “Prescription Drugs, Biologicals and Therapeutics.”   He was appointed to the RI Governor’s Advisory Council on Health from 1997 to 2005, designed and implemented the Rhode Island Pharmaceutical Assistance to the Elderly (RIPAE), and served as subcommittee chair on the American National Standards Institute’s Health Informatics Standards Board, which provided the early framework for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).