In just over a decade since graduating from ACPHS, Dr. Aniwaa Owusu Obeng '11 has achieved so much that you might assume her career dreams had come true.
She is a faculty member of the Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine and an associate professor in the Department of Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in Manhattan. She also coordinates Clinical Pharmacogenomics at Mount Sinai Hospital.
“So, I get to do three main things,” Owusu Obeng said. “I get to be a clinician, I get to be a teacher and I get to be a researcher.”
Owusu Obeng received the Outstanding Young Alumni Award from ACPHS on Saturday, Oct. 1. (She is pictured above receiving the award from Marion Morton ’84, chair of the Board of Trustees, and ACPHS President Toyin Tofade.)
Read more about all the 2022 Alumni Awards winners.
She expresses gratitude as she describes her professional positions – not only their significance, but how well they suit her. She is intelligent, of course, and also took advantage of every training opportunity she could. In addition, she is relentlessly curious and willing to take well-considered risks. So an emerging field like pharmacogenetics fits her to a tee.
Yet she will be the first to tell you that she never envisioned the career she has. Owusu Obeng’s success has come not so much from achieving her dream, but from her attitude toward what others might perceive as setbacks or closed doors. She learns from such events and looks toward the opportunities they bring, the alternate doors they open.
Take, for example, the way Owusu Obeng decided to pursue pharmacy studies at ACPHS. In high school, she wanted to be a physician, so had applied to pre-med programs. But then a guidance counselor discouraged her from that pursuit, noting how many years it would take her to practice medicine – eight years of schooling, followed by a residency of three to eight years. Whether or not that advice was appropriate, it struck a chord with Owusu Obeng, who sees the guidance counselor’s words as a blessing -- because they led her to pursue a doctorate in pharmacy (Pharm.D.).
“She might not have known that she was pushing me to the path that I could excel on,” Owusu Obeng said.
Culture Shock
When she arrived on the Albany campus in 2005, Owusu Obeng experienced culture shock. She had grown up in Ghana, where, as she wryly noted, “nobody discriminates against you because you are Black.” In 2002, her family moved to one of the most diverse communities in the world – New York City. It did not occur to Owusu Obeng three years later that Albany would be much different than NYC – it was still New York State, right? She was surprised to be one of only three African Americans in her class.
“I mean, this is 2005, right? It's not the 1980s or the 1960s,” she said. Worse, though she does not want to dwell on the incident or share it publicly, Owusu Obeng had at least one experience with a student who explicitly expressed discomfort with her because of her race. Owusu Obeng’s friends, mostly white, were appalled. But she took the perspective of the student, who was from a more rural community, in stride. “She’s just not comfortable, and I’m okay” was how Owusu Obeng described her thinking at the time.
Still, she conceded that the situation was not always easy. Owusu Obeng credits her deep roots in Christianity for her forgiving perspective. And she expressed gratitude especially toward ACPHS Associate Professor Dr. Ray Chandrasekara for supporting her emotionally through that time.
“We just have to persevere and get through it,” Owusu Obeng said she learned from Chandrasekara. “Because there are many people that are looking up to us.”
Discovering Her Calling
Academically, when it came time to decide on pharmacy practice experiences, she chose to pursue a PGY2 experience in pharmacotherapy, the use of medication to treat disease. She did not match with that residency, however, but was offered an interview in solid organ transplant. Unfortunately, that opportunity did not particularly interest her. Then she heard from a fellow pharmacy resident about an interview offer in a new residency program in genetics at the University of Florida College of Pharmacy. That program, it turned out, did not interest him.
The two decided to swap information on their residency interview offers – a decision that Owusu Obeng said led her to work with a great mentor, Dr. Julie Johnson, and to fall in love with an emerging field in which she would build her career. She was the first resident in the University of Florida pharmacogenomics program.
“I'm very curious as an individual and I don't like to do the same thing all the time,” Owusu Obeng said. “I knew that pharmacogenomics was something that was going to revolutionize pharmacy or medicine in general. I wanted to be one of the pioneers.”
Some of Owusu Obeng’s classmates told her she was making the wrong decision. But as with her choice to enroll at ACPHS, she took what she describes as a leap of faith. She knew the decision was right because once she had made it, she felt peace.
“I had friends that would reach out to me and say, why are you doing that? You're wasting your time. There are no jobs in this field,” she said. While she thought they might be right, she was undeterred – and, ultimately, rewarded. “Surprisingly, when I finished my PGY2 training, I had three job offers and they were very good offers.”
Indeed, Owusu Obeng is now among those leading the way in pharmacogenomics at Mount Sinai. The field explores how individual patients’ DNA contributes to their responses to medication. She is leading an effort to have increasing numbers of patients who enter the hospital genotyped, so their DNA can be analyzed for known reactions with several common medications. She is the first associate professor in the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai with a Pharm.D. rather than an M.D. or a Ph.D. – another area in which she is leading the way.
Diversifying the Field
Owusu Obeng continues to look at challenges as opportunities, and perhaps as a call for her to be an agent of change. In addition to the official responsibilities of her job, she serves as a preceptor for pharmacy students from ACPHS and Long Island University. She enjoys introducing them to a field of medicine that some may not have previously known about.
“Being able to supplement the little or no training that they get in genomics (in school) with this six-week or five-week training that they get, that's great,” she said. “Peace is my reward.”
She also continues to urge improvements on the ACPHS campus for minority students, given her own experience. The percentage of African Americans and other minorities on campus has grown since Owusu Obeng was a student. Among incoming students this semester, 42 percent identified as non-white, with 31 out of 181 new students (17 percent) identifying as African American or Black. Still, Owusu Obeng sees room for improvement for minority students at ACPHS, given what she continues to hear from some attending the school now.
Given the diversity within Albany, she would like to see closer connections between the College and the city’s high schools aimed at encouraging local minority students to enroll at ACPHS, and to provide them support as they move through their studies.
“We have to do better,” she said, and then, in her characteristic way, promptly committed to helping in that effort.
Other Alumni Awards 2022
Distinguished Alumni Award: Dr. Bernard Graham ‘71
Distinguished Alumni Award: Dr. Peter B. Corr ‘71
Student-Centered Award: Dr. Katie Cardone '06
Respect Nimish Patel Award: Dr. '06
Collaboration and Community Award: Dr. Lucio Volino '04