Sharon Youmans receives 2023 ASHP-ABHP Joint Leadership Award

ASHP Midyear Clinical Meeting – Highlights

Sharon L. Youmans, PharmD, MPH is Professor of Clinical Pharmacy and Executive Vice Dean, University of California San Francisco (UCSF) School of Pharmacy.  She is a respected educator, scholar, and leader with a passion for reducing racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare by fostering a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive healthcare workforce.  The joint leadership award was presented at the Annual Luncheon Meeting of the Association of Black Hospital Pharmacists (ABHP), held during the ASHP Midyear Clinical Meeting in Anaheim, California in December 2023

Presenting the award, ASHP President-elect Leigh Briscoe-Dwyer said:

“For many years, ASHP and ABHP have worked together to implement a shared vision in which pharmacy serves the healthcare needs of our communities. ASHP and ABHP recognize the vital role of pharmacists to improve, advance, and transform healthcare for all patients.

“For these reasons, it is fitting that today we honour Dr. Youmans … with the ASHP-ABHP Joint Leadership Award for her exceptional leadership in addressing racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare and fostering a more diverse and culturally literate healthcare workforce”.

For 15 years, Dr. Youmans has been the UCSF pharmacy school’s representative for the university’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. In particular, she led the transformation of the pharmacy school admissions process to encourage diversity, ushering in a system that considers candidates’ life experiences along with their academic record and also helped to transform the PharmD program to better support student pharmacists as they progress through their training.

In 2009, Dr. Youmans was named to the Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities Research and Education Advisory Board of the Xavier University of Louisiana College of Pharmacy. She has also served for a decade on the USCF Council on Campus Climate, Culture, and Inclusion, is a member of a UCSF executive council that guides the university’s anti-racism initiative, and is part of the University of California systemwide leadership collaborative that implements training materials and metrics in support of antiracism initiatives in all the university’s health science schools.

Dr. Youmans has been recognized numerous times over the years for her sustained leadership and contributions to the pharmacy profession. Her professional honors include more than a dozen awards from the UCSF School of Pharmacy that recognize her work as an educator, including:

• the UCSF 150th Anniversary Alumni Excellence Award
• the UCSF Founders Champion Award in recognition of her contributions to DEI, and
• the UCSF Chancellor Award for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Leadership in recognition of her outstanding leadership in expanding diversity, equity, and inclusion and advancing anti-racism.