New PhD students join the PharmaSafe group

The new PhD candidates have their daily workplace at the School of Pharmacy in Gydas Vei. Below, they have presented themselves.

Gerd Marie Eskerud Harris

I finished my master in Pharmacy in 2014 at the Department of Biomedicine at the University of Bergen. Before starting my PhD in PharmaSafe in PharmaSafe in September (2015), I worked as a hospital pharmacist in Oslo for one year.

My PhD is about migraine and the long-term safety of anti-migraine drugs in pregnancy. Triptans are the most commonly used anti-migraine drugs, and data on their safety in pregnancy is not sufficient. I am interested in the neurodevelopment of children who were exposed to triptans in fetal life. 

Drug safety is often measured in terms of immediate pregnancy outcomes, but the long-term neurodevelopmental effects are equally important, as disruptions in fetal neurodevelopment can lead to psychomotor, temperamental and behavioral disability in childhood. In my project I will use pharmacoepidemiological methods to investigate neurodevelopmental characteristics and risk of ADHD in children who were exposed to triptans in pregnancy, using data from the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study (MoBa), the Norwegian Patient Registry and the Norwegian Prescription Database.

Johanne Naper Trønnes

First of all I would like to say that I’m very happy to join this research group!

I have a Master in Pharmacy and graduated from the University of Tromsø three years ago. Since graduation I’ve worked in a community pharmacy in Oslo and in September this year I started as a PhD-candidate.

In my PhD-project I’ll be working with epidemiologic methods to address questions of drug safety in pregnancy. The preliminary title of my project is “Safety of medicines used in pregnancy – with focus on analgesics”.

In one part of the project I’ll be investigating the long-term safety of paracetamol with regards to neurodevelopmental outcomes in children. I’ll use data from the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study, which is a prospective cohort conducted by the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. This is important because paracetamol is a very commonly used drug among pregnant women and the information about the long-term safety of paracetamol is scarce. I’m looking forward to start the project and I hope my time in PharmaSafe will be fruitful.

Bich Thuy Truong

I finished my master in Pharmacy from the School of Pharmacy at the University of Oslo this summer and started as a PhD-Student at PharmaSafe in the end of August (2015).

The title of my PhD-project is “Drug-related problems (DRPs) in antenatal care and in the post-partum period” and the purposed titles for my three studies are:

1)Drug-related problems among newborns prenatally exposed to SSRIs – with focus on fetal cardiotocography (CTG) and neonatal Apgar-score.

2)Drug-related problems among pregnant and lactating women.

3)The quality of discharge summaries from maternity wards and the impact on patient follow-up.

As my colleagues in PharmaSafe I’m going to do studies related to optimal use and safety of medication among pregnant and lactating women. My studies are going to be conducted in a clinical setting and in collaboration with other health care professionals. The aim of the project is to contribute new knowledge about DRPs in this vulnerable patient-population and hopefully improve the quality of the women’s drug treatment during pregnancy and in the post-partum period