Dr. Vasu Nair, UGA College of Pharmacy professor emeritus and eminent scholar emeritus, and his wife, Barbara, have established two gifts for the College of Pharmacy that will remove barriers for students and encourage them to excel in their chosen field of study.

The Nair Graduate Student Fellowship Endowment is intended for one to two Ph.D. students in their final year of study who are conducting interdisciplinary research work in drug discovery, which will provide a therapeutic significance for a serious human disease state. The Nair Pharm.D. Student Travel Award Fund will defray the cost of traveling to a national clinical conference for one to two 4th year Pharm.D. students.

The Nairs believe it is important to support the academic excellence of the College of Pharmacy program. Dr. Nair remarked, “It is critical that we put a much greater emphasis on gifts and endowments that provide more academic opportunities for our students. I can say from personal experience that such gifts were invaluable to me in my own career.”

Dr. Nair has served as Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar, the Terry Endowed Chair in Drug Discovery and as the first academic Associate Dean for Research at the college. He was the founding director of the UGA Center for Drug Discovery, and he served as department head of CoP’s Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Sciences. He was the 2007 recipient of the Ernest H. Volwiler Award, which is viewed as the highest national research award presented by the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy. In 2008, he was selected as UGA’s Inventor of the Year. He was recruited to UGA in 2002 from the University of Iowa, where he was a Foundation Distinguished Professor. Barbara is a former secondary school science teacher in Iowa City, and she also served as science coordinator of the Iowa City Community School District.