EdD Student Ashley Yarabinec Receives Faculty Advisor Award
Ashley Yarabinec, a Doctor of Education (EdD) student at the University of Pittsburgh School of Education, received the 2024 Faculty Advisor Award of Excellence from the Professional Fraternity Association (PFA).
The award recognizes the “exemplary relationship” Yarabinec established with students as the faculty advisor for the Pitt School of Pharmacy’s chapter of the Kappa Psi Pharmaceutical Fraternity. Yarabinec will receive the award at PFA’s annual convention in Jacksonville, Florida, on September 5-7.
“As one of three advisors for Kappa Psi, our role is to encourage the students to make the chapter their own,” says Yarabinec, who is an assistant professor and associate director of experiential learning at Pitt Pharmacy. “I’m coaching behind the scenes, talking about how we can make their ideas happen and helping them grow as leaders.”
As someone who was a Kappa Psi member during her time in Pitt’s Doctor of Pharmacy program, Yarabinec has firsthand insight into the needs and challenges that students in the fraternity face.
“The brothers of the fraternity were there for me when things were difficult as a student, so I want to pay it forward and help other students find purpose and meaningful connections with their peers,” says Yarabinec.
As the associate director of experiential learning at Pitt Pharmacy, Yarabinec works with pharmacy students to coordinate high-quality experiential rotations. Her research focuses on diversifying the experiences that pharmacy students have during these rotations, with the goal of increasing students’ ability to care for diverse patient populations.
“I have a passion for justice and using my voice to help make things more equitable for people who are from oppressed backgrounds,” says Yarabinec. “By focusing my research on teaching students to care for vulnerable and minoritized populations, my hope is that, no matter where they end up after graduation, they will be a step ahead when it comes to caring for their patients.”
As a student in the EdD in Higher Education program, Yarabinec’s dissertation will examine how pharmacy schools can improve their experiential curriculum in order to better prepare students to care for minoritized populations.
“Within the didactic curriculum, we’ve built in more discussions about social determinants of health and pharmacoequity [a term used to describe a health system where all patients have access to high quality, evidence-based medications],” says Yarabinec. “We are just taking the first steps toward seeing how we can better incorporate that into the experiential portion of the curriculum in order to better educate students and help them be great practitioners.”
Yarabinec says the EdD program is instrumental in helping to focus her research and practice, and has provided valuable history and language for working within higher education.
“I can’t even express how beneficial the EdD program has been. It’s been revolutionary in changing who I am as a person and what I care about,” says Yarabinec. “I’m grateful for the Pitt Pharmacy administration, School of Education, and the team of people that I work with in experiential learning because we are all working towards the same thing: making our students great pharmacists.”
