The following is an excerpt from "Heads above the rest," a profile of Assistant Professor of Pharmacy Practice Christine Rabinak by the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy.

Christine A. Rabinak has always been passionate about psychology, especially learning and memory. But in her early training as a basic scientist, she was used to conducting research on animals in a lab, studying how their brains encode different types of associative learning. Think Pavlov's dogs, but instead of associating a bell with food, rodents were linking fear to a benign environmental cue that happened to be present during a traumatic event.

Rabinak's research was producing outcomes that had the potential to significantly impact treatment for patients suffering from traumas, particularly posttraumatic stress disorder, but one key component was missing from her lab work: humans.

"I felt so far removed from what an actual clinical application might be," she said. "I kept thinking, 'Is this what someone with PTSD is experiencing?'"

To answer that question, and more like it, she knew the next step in her career should be to expand her research toolbox, learn new skills, and translate the data she was seeing in animals into future patient treatments.

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