Personal relationships helped set Morgan Gilbert on her chosen path. Personal relationships, in a wholly different and marvelous way, continue to enrich her journey.
A member of Manchester University Doctor of Pharmacy Program’s second graduating class in 2017, Gilbert became interested in pharmacy in high school, after a family member suffered a serious drug interaction. And her child’s memory of her grandmother going through chemotherapy for lymphoma, plus subsequent encounters with cancer through friends and their families’ experiences with it, helped put oncology on her radar.
Today pharmacy and oncology are both her vocation and her passion as a hematology/bone marrow transplant pharmacist at IU Melvin and Bren Simon Cancer Center in Indianapolis.
“On a typical day, I get to educate patients coming in for their stem cell transplant regarding their conditioning chemotherapy regimen,” says Gilbert, 27. “I provide discharge education for patients, immunosuppression drug monitoring and dose adjustment, as well as interdisciplinary rounding with the Bone Marrow Transplant Team where I provide my pharmacy input on each patient and their current medications.”
The science for this she learned at Manchester, which attracted her because of its stellar reputation for science and the opportunity to help shape the Pharm.D. Program as one of its pioneers. What she’s found most rewarding beyond that are the sort of personal relationships that motivated her to begin with.
“I love working on a multidisciplinary team where I get to learn new things each day. I get to work with patients from various backgrounds and I get to build close relationships with these individuals,” Gilbert says. “I get to work closely with them on the inpatient side ... and I also get to continue seeing them in clinic.”
Those sorts of connections extend beyond just pharmacist-patient. As part of her many duties, Gilbert also enjoys passing on what she’s learned to the pharmacy students and residents she teaches, and to continue to learn new therapies from them as well.
“It’s hard to pick what I feel is most rewarding with my job, because honestly? It probably differs each day,” she says.