ALBANY, NY, September 05, 2017 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Marquis Who's Who, the world's premier publisher of biographical profiles, is proud to name Claire Mary Lathers a Lifetime Achiever. An accomplished listee, Dr. Lathers celebrates many years' experience in her professional field, and has been noted for achievements, leadership qualities, and the credentials and successes she has accrued in her field. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
Pharmacological science provides life-saving drugs that go through vigorous testing and safety review, sometimes taking many years. Dr. Lathers has devoted the last four decades and more toward the study, development, and official government review of risk/benefit pharmacology and toxicology of cardio-renal drugs and new animal drug applications, spending 11 years of her career in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), including serving as President Clinton's Food Safety Officer at FDA and Credentialed Senior Biomedical Research Scientist and 19 years at National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (JSC). In recognition of her years of service, she has received a thank you for her service to the Nation signed by two Presidents: Clinton and Obama. Following her tenure at the FDA, Dr. Lathers now offers her experience as a clinical pharmacologist consultant.
Throughout her career, Dr. Lathers has been privileged to work in four different arenas: Academia, Government (2 agencies), and the Pharmaceutical Industry. She also volunteered in a nonprofit professional clinical pharmacology organization for 44 years to date. All use different drivers to obtain and determine success. She has simultaneously held positions in at least three of these areas throughout her four decades of working as a scientist and teacher. Dr. Lathers has persistently pursed intellectual underpinnings of basic and clinical sciences to broaden the scientific knowledge base of unresolved medical questions while working across the boundaries of her different positions. An intellectual focus has been to utilize the foundation of basic and clinical pharmacology to build upon facts gleaned from all her areas of employment. Employment in the different arenas allowed Dr. Lathers to work on many different areas of science during her career. In her job history, Dr. Lathers has demonstrated the ability to conduct translational studies, for example taking findings from animal studies and applying them to human therapy and taking appropriate findings obtained in humans and applying them for better health in animals.
During her professional pharmacological and clinical pharmacology positions in academia, government, and the pharmaceutical industry, Dr. Lathers has published basic and clinical studies. Working with her graduate and medical students, postdoctoral fellows, residents and collaborators, Dr. Lathers has authored or co-authored over 300 peer reviewed scientific publications, review articles, book chapters, and abstracts, edited four medical books and three complete issues of J Clinical Pharmacology and presented at more than 140 international, national and medical meetings. She is lead Co-Editor of three books "Sudden Death in Epilepsy: Mechanisms & New Methods for Analyzing Risks," "Sudden Death in Epilepsy: Forensic and Clinical Issues," and "Epilepsy and Sudden Death." Her fourth book was "Cardiovascular Therapeutics in Clinical Practice," Co-Editors Frankl, Roberts and Lathers.
At the FDA, Dr. Lathers worked with many different risk experts and risk analyses to evaluate the effect of use of drugs in humans and animals and food safety. She wrote and published papers on risk analysis, risk methods, data outcome and risk management. All of this experience collectively has provided the foundation for Dr. Lathers to serve as the lead clinical pharmacologist for multi-institutional, international collaboration to develop concepts of how to decrease the risk of SUDEP by forming clusters of SUDEP risk factors and mechanisms to better understand, manage risk, predict and prevent SUDEP. She is an Emeritus Fellow and a Life-Time Honorary Member of the Board of Regents of the American College of Clinical Pharmacology. Membership in this organization from 1973 to the present provides her with state of the art knowledge of the clinical pharmacology of new drugs and treatments for disease and allows this volunteer arena to be used by Dr. Lathers when working across the boundaries of her different positions in academia, government, and pharmaceutical industry.
Dr. Lathers received a Bachelor of Science in pharmacy from Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, Union University. In 1974, she earned a PhD in pharmacology from the State University of New York in Buffalo, where the intrigue of the discovery of mechanistically how and where in the body a drug acts to produce a pharmacological effect in vivo and vitro and the associated excitement of success became an important factor in her future career. Dr. Lathers' career includes working 20 years full time as an academic faculty member and simultaneously 11 years of teaching undergraduate pharmacology part time in the Natural Science Division at Gwynedd Mercy College, PA from 1978 to 1989. Initially as NIH funded postdoctoral fellow at the Medical College of Pennsylvania (now Drexel University College of Medicine), then promoted to Instructor, Assistant Professor, and Associate Professor over 15 years. During this time Dr. Lathers also collaborated with four pharmaceutical companies. Congress had noted that NASA lacked diversity and requested them to correct this. Thus Dr. Lathers was one of the first women working in academia to be invited to do a sabbatical at NASA JSC. After the NASA Challenger Shuttle accident, Dr. Lathers' expertise in autonomic cardiovascular pharmacology resulted in an invitation to serve as a Visiting Scientist for a sabbatical at NASA JSC, BioMed Research Institute and Universities Space Research Association (USRA) Division Space Biomedicine, organized auspices National Academy Sciences (now Lunar Planetary Institute, Division Life Sciences). Dr. Lathers worked with NASA experts on the problem of autonomic dysfunction and orthostatic intolerance associated with space flight. She also conducting human experiments at Baylor Medical School and in the Cardio-Lab as NASA worked to rebuild the scientific space flight program and the function of the Cardio-Renal Laboratory. During her Houston sabbatical, Dr. Lathers continued to supervise her own Philadelphia medical school laboratory and to deliver all of her medical lectures. Dr. Lathers worked on the problem of orthostatic intolerance, a condition where body fluids shift. Symptoms include lightheadedness and fainting as the blood flows away from the brain. Dr. Lathers flew many times on NASA's KC 135, conducting experiments to test protocols and equipment while also training astronauts to conduct experiments in the weightlessness of flight in outer space. NASA's weightless atmospheric test flight is colloquially named the "Vomit Comet," and Dr. Lathers can be seen enjoying it immensely in latter reports and photographs. Drs. Lathers and her co-authors were able to make a connection from orthostatic intolerance to cases of cardiovascular dysfunction also observed in experiments conducted in bedridden test subjects and hospital patients on Earth. Dr. Lathers worked at NASA to collect data from subjects in ground-based studies and from astronauts and cosmonauts before, during and after space flight as an invited Visiting Scientist to NASA for 19 years, from 1988 to 2003 and 2013 to 2016.
In 1989, Dr. Lathers accepted a position with the FDA in Rockville, Maryland, as a reviewer of the pharmacology and toxicology of cardio-renal drug applications. At this time Dr. Lathers became one of the first women to be invited to work regularly at NASA as a Visiting Scientist: NASA and FDA lawyers worked out an agreement to share her expertise. While at FDA she also simultaneously worked at Uniformed Services University Health Science, Department of Pharmacology in the medical school as well as in the Cardio-Renal Laboratory at NASA/JSC. Dr. Lathers, as reviewer of a drug application to treat the cardiovascular effects of Shy-Drager, suspected that the given drug might work as the first pharmacological countermeasure for the orthostatic hypotensive observed in astronauts. She obtained permission of the FDA and industry to suggest to NASA scientists that the drug should be studied. Positive effects were found. Dr. Lathers also observed many Shy-Drager patients at Vanderbilt Medical School and then worked with FDA officials and the industry to make the drug available for patients with this disease.
Dr. Lathers served as the first woman President and Dean, and Professor of Pharmacology, at the Albany College of Pharmacy Health Sciences at Union University while simultaneously working in NASA. Then, as Chief Scientific Officer at Barr Pharmaceuticals she developed innovator and generic clinical protocols and trials while simultaneously working in industry and NASA. In 1999, Dr. Lathers was credentialed as Senior Biomedical Research Scientist, for international recognition of research in two areas of cardiovascular neural autonomic dysfunction associated with spaceflight and with sudden death in persons with epilepsy and for professional management experience in drug development, the business world, and clinical pharmacology. Her credentials as a recognized international scientist were approved by Commissioner Jane E Henney, M.D. and signed by the Hon. Sec. Donna E Shalala M.D. Department of Health and Human Services. Dr. Lathers was appointed President Clinton's Food Safety Officer at FDA and accepted an appointment to the FDA as Director of the Office of New Animal Drug Evaluation and was a member of the Commissioner's Senior Science Council. She served as a Senior Advisor of Science for the administration from 2002 to 2003 and was assigned the lead for post-911 development of Biomedical Countermeasures and food safety for FDA, NIH, NASA, and academia. Dr. Lathers worked as a Clerk in an appellate law firm from 2010-2013 and during a 6 month transition period from industry to FDA 1999.
Dr. Lathers was the first woman to be elected President of the American College of Clinical Pharmacology in Hartford, NY (now Ashburn, VA) from 1994 to 1996. She was elected Treasurer from 1992-1994, a board member of American College Clinical Pharmacology 1988 to 1996, and an honorary regent to the board 1996 to the present. Dr. Lathers was a member of the Advisory Board Joint Initiative Food Safety and Nutrition (JIFSAN) and FDA, University of Maryland 1999 to 2003. From 1994 to 1998, she was a member of the Annapolis Center of Maryland to conduct risk assessments in epidemiology, toxicology, and food safety workshops and accords. She chaired the Joint Liaison Committee of the American College of Clinical Pharmacology, American Society of Clinical Pharmacology, and American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, tasked to develop M.D. and Ph.D. board certification in clinical pharmacology, 1989 and 1990 and was a board member of the Albany-Tula Russia Alliance, a volunteer sister organization to Albany, NY, 1994 to 1996. Dr. Lathers worked for 17 years as Section Editor of the Education Series: Innovative Teaching Methods for Medical and Pharmacy Schools, published in the Journal of Clinical Pharmacology. In recognition of her achievements, Dr. Lathers was selected for inclusion in the 2011 volume of Who's Who in American Science and Engineering and has received many awards. In her spare time, Dr. Lathers enjoys hiking in the Adirondack Mountains, swimming, writing, and golf. In recognition of outstanding contributions to her profession and the Marquis Who's Who community, Dr. Lathers has been featured on the Marquis Who's Who Lifetime Achievers website. Please visit www.ltachievers.com for more information about this honor.
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