140 The Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences
The Faculty has a long and proud history of achievement. It began as a Department in the Faculty of Medicine on April 13, 1914. Two programs were offered at that time—a one-year Licensing Diploma (discontinued in 1918) and a two-year PhmB degree. The Department became a School in 1917 under the Faculty of Arts and Science. The first graduates of the newly approved Bachelor of Science in Pharmacy degree program obtained their degrees in 1921 (three students). They had the unique distinction of being the first in the British Empire to graduate from a four-year degree program in Pharmacy (others at the time were three years in length). Over the next two decades, the School continued to grow and prosper, jurisdiction having been transferred back to the Faculty of Medicine in 1939. The School was granted Faculty status in 1955, and in the 1989-90 academic year, Pharmacy became a five-year program (one-professional year plus four professional years in the Faculty).
Graduate Studies and Research have always been strengths of the Faculty and goes back to its first PhD graduate in 1961. This was the first PhD degree granted by a School or Faculty of Pharmacy in Canada. In recognition of its flourishing Graduate Studies program in the Pharmaceutical Sciences, in 1968 the Faculty was renamed the Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.
Current enrolment in the Faculty includes 511 undergraduate students, 60 graduate students and 40 teaching and research Faculty members.
Our student pharmacists have placed first in the country in one or more components of the national licensing exams for 18 of the last 22 years and had the top student in The Pharmacy Examining Board of Canada for 12 of those years including 2009 and 2010.
The Faculty’s mission is to address the needs of society as they relate to pharmacy and the pharmaceutical sciences. Its pledge is to carry out that mission through discovery, dissemination, and application of new knowledge involving teaching and learning, research and creative activity, community involvement, and partnerships. The vision of the Faculty is excellence in pharmacy education and research through learning, discovery and citizenship.
