In Support of Great Science,
Outstanding Scientists

The Hans W. Vahlteich Professorship
Established by Beverly Vahlteich DeLaney, Spring 2001

Many College alumni have found unusual ways to use their Michigan Pharmacy education, but few can top Hans W. Vahlteich, BSPharm'20, MSPharm'21, for uniqueness.

He spent his entire career at Best Foods, Inc. Between 1924 and his retirement in 1961, he rose through the corporate ranks from research chemist to vice president for research and quality control in 1943.

Raised in the family pharmacy business at a time when nearly all prescriptions were compounded, Vahlteich developed an early passion for applied chemistry. He never lost it. Among his many career successes was his patented work in the selective hydrogenation of domestic vegetable oils that helped transform Hellmann's Mayonnaise(R) and Best Foods Mayonnaise(R) into nationally recognized brand names.

With a scientist's penetrating curiosity and an entrepreneur's enthusiasm for innovation, Vahlteich traveled the globe meeting suppliers, studying and improving manufacturing processes, identifying new plant strains with commercial potential, seeking new and better sources of raw materials.

A scientist and executive at Best Foods, Inc., 1924-1961, Hans W. Vahlteich traversed the globe in search of new and better ideas, ingredients, and technology that could be harnessed for commercial ends. Here, he visits a pineapple plantation in Cuba in 1953. Photo courtesy Beverly Vahlteich DeLaney.

His Michigan Pharmacy legacy came full circle in fall 2007 when the College's own David H. Sherman, PhD, was appointed the first Hans W. Vahlteich Professor of Medicinal Chemistry. Endowed in 2001 by a $3.4 million gift from Vahlteich's daughter, Beverly Vahlteich DeLaney, the Vahlteich Professorship was established to honor a College-affiliated scientist who best exemplifies Vahlteich's combination of creativity, energy, and focus.

Just like Vahlteich, Sherman travels to remote locations -- such as coral reefs off the coasts of Costa Rica, Panama, and Papua New Guinea -- in his quest to find and then isolate naturally occurring compounds with the potential to selectively destroy human cancer cells and infectious bacteria.

And like Vahlteich, who drew from multiple and diverse fields in his food chemistry work, Sherman's research integrates molecular genetic, biochemical, and bioorganic chemistry; marine biology and chemistry; enzymology; microbiology; and other science disciplines.

"An endowed professorship, such as the Vahlteich Professorship, is one of the highest honors our College -- for that matter, any college or university -- can bestow on a faculty member," explains Dean Frank J. Ascione, BSPharm'69, PharmD'73, PhD. "Named professorships are intended to single out an individual as being one of the best in his or her field. David certainly meets that criteria.

Our College conducted an extensive international search for the right person to be the first Vahlteich Professor. We considered many exceptional scientists, but no one deserved the honor more than David Sherman."

Beverly Vahlteich DeLaney has spoken with Sherman on two occasions. The most recent was in May 2005 when she and her husband, Bill DeLaney, toured Sherman's labs at the Life Sciences Institute where he heads the Center for Chemical Genomics.

"Dr. Sherman reminds me a lot of my father," Beverly remarks. "Both received their PhD in chemistry at Columbia University, as did my mother, Ella McCollum Vahlteich. Dr. Sherman's scientific interests are wide-ranging, and he draws his ideas from many diverse sources, just as my father did. Most of all, when Dr. Sherman talks about his work, there's the same excitement I used to hear in my father's voice. I know my father would really like this man."

Hans W. Vahlteich Professor of Medicinal Chemistry David Sherman gathers marine flora and fauna from biodiverse ecosystems, such as those found in coral reefs, as a first step in isolating chemical compounds with potential as anticancer and antimicrobial agents. Here, Sherman is shown on a 2004 specimen gathering dive off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Photo courtesy David Sherman.

* * *

The Albert M. Mattocks Professorship
Established by an Anonymous Donor, Fall 2007

From 1952 to 1966 -- minus two years in the early 1960s when he was technical director at R.P. Scherer Corp. in Detroit -- Albert Mattocks, PhD, was a professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at the U-M College of Pharmacy. In addition to teaching an undergraduate course in manufacturing pharmacy (an indispensable skill set to have in those days), Mattocks helped build a leading graduate program in what is now known as pharmaceutics and drug delivery.

In 1966, Mattocks returned to his home state of North Carolina to become a professor in the School of Pharmacy at UNC; later serving as head of that school's division of pharmaceutics. He remained at UNC for 15 years, retiring in 1981 and passing away in 1997 after a brief illness.

During his Michigan career, Mattocks influenced the lives and careers of many graduate and undergraduate students. In fall 2007, one decade after Mattocks' death, an anonymous donor established the Albert M. Mattocks Professorship at the Michigan College of Pharmacy.

"All we can say is that it was someone who admired Al Mattocks, what he stood for, and what he accomplished in terms of graduate student education," explains Dean Emeritus and Professor Emeritus Ara G. Paul, PhD, a colleague of Mattocks' for eight of his Michigan Pharmacy years. "This gesture of exceptional generosity is a tribute to a great teacher who inspired excellence and ingenuity in his students, and who led by personal example."

Remembering Al

Albert Mattocks

By the time he joined the College as a 35-year-old professor in 1952, Mattocks had studied synthetic drugs and burn therapy at the Southern Research Institute in Birmingham, Ala., and enzyme inhibition and drug assays at Western Reserve University in Cleveland; headed the Drug Standards Laboratory of the American Pharmaceutical Association in Washington, D.C.; and was involved in research on drug-absorption at McNeil Laboratories in Philadelphia.

In academia, Mattocks worked in very diverse areas, from the physical chemical and engineering aspects of dosage form development to biopharmaceutics and pharmacokinetics. Always an innovator in the problems he studied, Mattocks brought new experimental approaches and methods of analysis, including the use of statistics and experimental design.

"These are commonly used in the pharmaceutical industry today, but new to our field at the time," Zografi states. "Although he never became identified with any one specific area of research while at U-M, each of Al's forays into a new area provided important fundamental answers and opened up these fields for further studies by his former students, and others who followed."

Pharmaceutical sciences was a most unusual career path for a PhD in synthetic chemistry, but Mattocks was a most unusual man, explains King Chiu Kwan, BSPharm'56, MSPharm'58, PhD'62. "Al was both a nice guy and an intelligent guy," recalls Kwan, retired vice president of drug metabolism at Merck. "I learned a lot from him. We all did."

Kwan's first project, as a graduate student of Mattocks', was to automate tablet coating.

"In those days tablets were sugar coated, and sugar coating is water-based," notes Kwan. "As moisture affects drug stability, my thesis ultimately studied how moisture is dissipated during the coating process."

Kwan solved the moisture problem on his first try, instantly capturing Mattocks' respect. When Kwan graduated in 1962, Mattocks, who had just moved to R.P. Scherer, asked Kwan to join him. Mattocks admired Kwan's scientific acumen, and Kwan thrived under Mattocks' self-directed management style.

"I accepted Al's offer and ran a lab at Scherer for almost two years doing everything but gelatin caps," Kwan laughs. "Mostly, I worked on Al's favorite projects, like ideas he had about making liquid aspirin."

Kwan and Mattocks also investigated variances in bioavailability and absorption characteristics of vitamins -- vitamins being Scherer's main staple, back then.

"It's hard to quantify the impact Al Mattocks had on my career, but I'm grateful that I had the opportunity to study with him both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student," Kwan explains. "He asked a lot of useful questions and then turned you loose to find the answers."

Even after Mattocks went to North Carolina, his former Michigan students continued to visit him at home and seek him out at professional meetings.

The Mattocks reunions weren't unique to former U-M students, explains Mattocks' youngest son, Kurt Duckek Mattocks, 47, of Chapel Hill, N.C.

"Dad had a great relationship with his UNC students," says Kurt. "He knew them all and kept up with their lives. Whenever someone would stop by our home, Mom and Dad would drop everything. They'd sit in the living room, laughing and talking for hours. The students were like extended family. It was really neat."

Asked what he thinks Al Mattocks would make of the professorship named in his honor, Kurt replies:

"My dad wasn't big on publicizing himself, but I think he would be really flattered that someone cared enough to do this."

* * *

Surrounding Gordon and Pamela Amidon are current members of Dr. Amidon's research group. They include, left to right: graduate student Jing Sun, graduate student Haili Ping, research fellow Arik Dahan, Gordon Amidon, assistant research scientist Chet Provoda, Pamela Amidon, research fellow Yasuhiro Tsume, and graduate student Hairat Sabit. Amidon research group members not present at the time the photo was taken include graduate students Cara Hartz and Jonathan Miller, and research fellows Deepak Gupta and Sheeba Varghes.

In 2007, the Amidons put their good intentions to work by establishing the Gordon and Pamela Amidon Fellowship in Pharmaceutics at the U-M College of Pharmacy. To initiate the Amidon Fellowship, Gordon and Pam pledged $250,000 of their own money, and then matched that with $250,000 from Therapeutic Systems Research Laboratories (TSRL), Inc., an Ann Arbor-based research pharmaceutical firm founded by Gordon in 1986. The University met their $500,000 gift with $250,000 from President Mary Sue Coleman's Graduate/Professional Student Support Challenge fund. Launched in September 2007, the President's Challenge matches one dollar for every two a donor pledges, up to $1 million, per donor. (The Graduate/Professional Student Support Challenge will continue until $40 million is committed in gifts to graduate and professional student support.)

"For years, Pam and I had discussed establishing a fellowship at the College, but we lacked the means as we were helping finance our own sons' college educations -- at times, several sons at once," explains Gordon. "Since the last of our sons graduated a few years back, we've been looking at the best way to finance a fellowship. The President's Graduate/Professional Student Support Challenge came at the right time for us."

The Amidons' motivation to help young scholars achieve their career dreams has deep roots in their own lives.

All of their sons received musical training from an early age and were the recipients of various music scholarships during high school and college. In addition, two of their sons attended DePauw University where they received merit-based scholarship support.

Gordon notes that his own education was made possible by financial support received both as an undergraduate student in pharmacy at SUNY Buffalo, and as a graduate student at Michigan.

"I've achieved what I have in life because there were resources to support my education," Gordon comments. "There's no other way I could have done it, and I know that's true for most of our students."

As the cost of educating and training pharmaceutical sciences graduate students continues to rise, financial support takes on greater urgency, Gordon states.

"If you did a rigorous cost accounting -- salary, health insurance, facilities and equipment depreciation, supplies, library services, utilities -- you'd discover that the annual cost of educating and training a graduate student in the basic sciences would exceed $50,000 annually," he notes. "While that real cost is supported by several mechanisms, I can say from my own academic experience that fellowship support for graduate training is one of the most significant contributors.

"Our College's well-earned reputation for all-around academic and research excellence is premised upon our ability to attract, and train, highly qualified students who then become leaders in the pharmaceutical sciences," Gordon adds. "Pam and I are gratified knowing that our endowed fellowship will contribute to keeping our College competitive for the best and brightest."

* * *

Professor Emeritus Norman Weiner, left, and Madurai Ganesan, PostDoc'84, at the College's 2006 Science Symposium, held in Ann Arbor.

To make sure that happens, Ganesan made a $50,000 gift in 2006 to establish the Norman Weiner Graduate Scholarship Fund at the College of Pharmacy.

"The honor came as a total surprise to me," Weiner says. "Ganesan called me up and told me after the fact. It was such a kind and generous gesture that I didn't know what to say. I still don't know what to say, except thank you. Thank you. The truth is that I always felt he gave more to me than I gave to him."

Weiner illustrates with an example. He and Ganesan were working on a liposome project and Ganesan suggested a transdermal approach. Weiner replied that he was "90 percent certain" that it wouldn't work, but advised Ganesan to get a second opinion from then-Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences Gordon Flynn, PhD, who was more expert than Weiner in transdermal delivery. Ganesan met with Flynn, who agreed with Weiner.

"I could see Ganesan was disappointed," Weiner recalls. "So I said, 'You still think this is going to work, don't you?' He said, 'Yes.' So I said, 'Then do it; professors aren't always right.' Well, he did the experiment his way, and it worked. Not only that, but his discovery provided the basis of my research for the next 15 years."

Ganesan has his own collection of stories proving that he received more than he gave. Such as the time Weiner sent him $1,200, unsolicited, so Ganesan could pay his rent while transitioning to his first job, at American Cyanamid Co. Or the fact that Weiner ghost-wrote Ganesan's first resume.

"I drafted a resume and asked Norman to look it over," relates Ganesan. "He said, 'You know, Ganesan, for industry you should have a totally different type of resume. Let me work on it for you.' Norman entirely rewrote it. That resume helped me land my first job after leaving Norman's research group. I still have Norman's handwritten copy. I keep it as a reminder of how his generosity made a difference in my life."