The St. Louis College of Pharmacy recently hired Kimberly L. Simmons as its assistant vice president of diversity and inclusion.
In addition to her academic duties as an assistant professor, Simmons is tasked with recruiting more minorities into the school of about 1,300 students and retaining them.
She will also outreach to minority communities on service projects, address health disparities and work with various offices around campus to help make the campus more inclusive, she said.
Simmons, an Atlanta native, came to St. Louis after meeting college President John Pieper two years ago in Chicago at a conference of Illinois pharmacists.
“That’s where he shared his vision of advancing diversity for the college and also fulfilling my desire to teach as well,” Simmons said. “He offered me the position at the time, but the timing was just not right.”
She said the two kept in contact.
“So two years later, I am here,” she said.
Currently, the College of Pharmacy has about a five percent African-American student population, Simmons said, and is looking to grow that number to six or seven percent.
She said the goal is to “represent the St. Louis community in the patients that we serve.”
Scholarships help.
“The president does have a diversity pot of scholarships set out for students, which has been very helpful in terms of helping them to see that we do care, we do want to support them,” she said.
“I think sometimes the mentality among the African-American community is, ‘Oh my gosh, this is going to put me in debt.’ So that definitely helps cut down on the debt.’
The addition of a pipeline program geared toward college undergraduate students interested in attending pharmacy school is being established by Simmons and the college’s director of Diversity, Freddie Wills.
The college traditionally accepts students straight out of high school into the freshman year, where they complete two years of their college prerequisites, followed by an automatic admission into the pharmacy program, which is another four years.
“Under the president’s direction, we have started to accept more transfer students who have completed those undergraduate prerequisites or have a degree,” Simmons said.
They also are working on a new summer program for those undergraduate students, which she says will be “very advantageous” for incoming African-American students. That pipeline program, she said, will provide support “in terms of teaching study skills, setting up a mentoring program for them as well as test-taking techniques.”
Other student pipeline programs at the college include the BESt program, Walgreen Explores and a partnership with St. Louis Public Schools for a summer pharmacy academy program at McKinley Middle School.
Previously, Simmons worked at SOLVAY Pharmaceuticals in medical information and regulatory affairs and for SIGVARIS as a pharmacy relations manager.
Simmons originally went to school on scholarships for a biology/pre-med with the ambition of being a pediatric surgeon.
“After those funds ran out after a year, I took advantage of the Georgia University system which provided free tuition if you attended a state institution,” she said. “So I transferred to the University of Georgia in Athens.”
Admitting that she is not the outdoorsy type, a required ecology class forced Simmons to leave the rural college life and switch gears.
“The fact that I worked in a pharmacy since I was 16 years old, I decided, ‘Huh, I can go to pharmacy school without having my undergraduate degree?’” Simmons said.
She applied to pharmacy school at Mercer University in Atlanta and enrolled in the dual degree program to obtain an MBA and her PharmD.
In 2008, she graduated with a doctor of pharmacy and an MBA from Mercer, followed with a one-year residency in drug information at SOLVAY Pharmaceuticals, Kaiser Permanente and Mercer.
“It gave me lots of exposure across academia, the pharmaceutical industry, managed care as well as the hospital setting,” she said.
Simmons also wants pursue her interest in alumni relations to work with College of Pharmacy graduates to reactivate or establish an alumni chapter of the National Pharmaceutical Association in this area.
“We’re looking to kind of pull the talent we have here together in St. Louis,” she said.
“I understand it’s a rich group of individuals with a wealth of ideas and talent. I want them to be a support to St. Louis College of Pharmacy as well as SIUE students.”
Simmons and her husband Deroyce Simmons, who is also a pharmacist, have an infant son, Royce.
She is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.
Simmons also said she is interested in working with boards of organizations on issues affecting the African-American community, one being the Lupus Foundation, “because it affects so many African Americans,” she said. “I’m definitely looking to roll up my sleeves and work with one of the chapters here. I think right now, St. Louis is my oyster.”
