To honor two longtime advocates and donors to the college, the existing College of Pharmacy building will be renamed the Joseph D. & Millie E. Williams Science Hall in a noon ceremony today on the west side of the building.
The new $35 million Lozier Center for Pharmacy Sciences and Education/UNMC Center for Drug Discovery, set to open next summer and under construction just across the way, also will feature two auditoriums named for the couple.
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Joe Williams is a distinguished alumnus and 1950 graduate of the College of Pharmacy. He started as a traveling salesman based out of Beatrice, Neb., and rose through the ranks of the pharmaceutical company Parke-Davis. After a merger, he was elected president, then chairman and CEO of Warner-Lambert.
“Joe Williams epitomizes why someone should come to Nebraska to study pharmacy,” said Courtney Fletcher, Pharm.D., dean of the UNMC College of Pharmacy. “Here, we will give you the tools for success, whether that be in your Nebraska hometown or on the national and world stage as Joe has done. Joe’s career is one of my best recruiting strategies.”
The couple previously established a Scholarship Leadership Award for the college and most recently served as one of the principal donors to the new state-of-the-art facility.
Joe Williams was instrumental in establishing the Parke-Davis Chair in Pharmaceutics, the college’s first endowed faculty chair. The auditorium in the newly-named Williams building already is named in his honor.
“The gifts that Joe and Millie have provided keep us moving forward as we enter our second century of educating pharmacists and pharmaceutical scientists,” Dr. Fletcher said.
Joe Williams was the 1980 recipient of the Remington Honor Medal, the American Pharmacists Association’s highest honor. He also holds 13 honorary degrees and served on several major national boards, chairing Project Hope and the United Negro College Fund.
He was unable to travel to make the ceremony, but in a 2012 visit to UNMC, Joe Williams expressed his excitement for the College of Pharmacy’s future. As for the career he’d had, he lauded his education and said the secret to his success in the pharmaceutical industry was that he had been a Nebraska-trained pharmacist.
Pharmacy may as well have been in his blood.
“I had an aptitude for it,” he said, “and I liked it a lot.”
I had the pleasure of meeting Joe on one of his visits to UNMC in the 1990s. It was easy to see how he was able to rise to the top of Warner-Lambert. What a class act and a great supporter of the College of Pharmacy! Thanks, Joe!