Lawrence Lash, Ph.D., a 38-year veteran of the Wayne State University School of Medicine faculty, received the 2025 President’s Excellence in Teaching Award at the annual Academic Recognition Ceremony, held April 24 in the Student Center Ballroom.
He also was named a Distinguished Service Professor, a new faculty classification to be used in rare instances to designate senior members of the university faculty who have made extraordinary contributions to the university outside their own disciplines or who, by unusual service outside of the university, have brought great honor and recognition to the institution.
Dr. Lash joined the School of Medicine in 1988.
“Receipt of the 2025 President’s Excellence in Teaching Award is a great honor indeed. Often in the day-to-day rush and toil of activities, it is easy to feel that one’s efforts go unnoticed. I am very appreciative that the committee that evaluated applicants for this award considered my impact on WSU’s teaching mission to be a positive one,” he said.
His teaching includes didactic and small-group facilitation with medical and graduate students, course development and direction, and mentoring of Basic Medical Sciences master’s degree students and Pharmacology doctoral students.
He is a small-group facilitator in the first-year medical student Problem-Based Learning sessions, first- and second-year Pharmacovigilance case studies, and a faculty mentor for the first-year medical student First Patient Project, which involves students researching a topic and writing an essay related to their “first patient” in the Gross Anatomy lab.
“Although there are always important facts to communicate in teaching, those can always be looked up in a book or, nowadays, online,” Dr. Lash said. “However, I feel that an important key to teaching is communication of strategies to assimilate and interpret those facts to understand issues and solve problems. Thus, I always try to communicate methods and approaches to a subject as much as key content.”
Dr. Lash co-directs the Human Body Foundations 2 course for first-year medical students and the Introductory Graduate Pharmacology course. He also runs the Clinical Pharmacology elective for fourth-year medical students, a one-month online course held three times during the year.
He maintains a virtual Medical Pharmacology and Therapeutics Canvas site for first- and second-year medical students that collates and highlights Pharmacology instruction in the pre-clerkship curriculum, providing a one-stop resource for students preparing for the Step 1 United States Medical Licensing Examination board exam.
“Pharmacology is a highly integrated discipline that bridges the basic and clinical sciences. One of my goals is to communicate how key principles of Pharmacology are illustrated in the topic about which I am lecturing or facilitating,” he said.
Outside of the School of Medicine, Dr. Lash is editor of the journals Toxicology Reports and Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology; and associate editor of the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics and Pharmacology and Therapeutics. His areas of research include glutathione in kidney function and toxicity, mechanisms of acute and chronic cytotoxicity of environmental chemicals in the human kidney and development of biomarkers of environmental chemical-induced nephrotoxicity.
Additional awards given to School of Medicine faculty at the Academic Recognition Ceremony include:
Board of Governors Distinguished Faculty Fellowship
Maik Hüttemann, Ph.D., professor, Center for Molecular Medicine and Genetics
Board of Governors Faculty Recognition Award
Arash Javanbakht, M.D., associate professor (clinical scholar), Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences
Distinguished Service Professor
Wei-Zen Wei, Ph.D., distinguished service professor and the Herrick Endowed Chair of Cancer Research, Department of Oncology
Distinguished Service Award
James Jackson, academic services officer, Department of Pharmacology
Community Engagement Awards
Hilary Marusak, Ph.D., associate professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurosciences
Elizabeth Towner, Ph.D., assistant professor, Department of Family Medicine and Public Health Sciences
Jennell White, Ph.D., assistant professor, Department of Pharmacology