The Walgreen Company, one of the nation’s largest drugstore chains, has donated $350,000 to support an interdisciplinary, multi-use suite of 10 skills room in the University of Iowa College of Pharmacy’s new building. The state-of-the-art suite will be named in Walgreens’ honor.

The new UI pharmacy building will be a high-tech, universal-design facility of about 170,000 square feet. Among its many features will be cutting-edge research laboratories, innovative technology, and collaborative learning spaces. 

“We are so grateful to Walgreens for its generous commitment to our transformational new facility,” says UI College of Pharmacy Dean Donald E. Letendre. “This suite of Walgreens Pharmacy Skills rooms will be a highly visible and integral part of Iowa pharmacy students’ learning experiences; we will use these spaces every day.” 

Each new skills room will accommodate up to four students and be used for, among other things, clinical exams, patient counseling, and compounding medications, as well as working with interdisciplinary UI Health Sciences teams.  

The UI College of Pharmacy is one of the oldest and most highly esteemed institutions of its kind in the country, and it helped create unit-dose medication safety, build an innovative pharmaceuticals-manufacturing program, and establish the Iowa Center for Pharmaceutical Care.  

Walgreens operates 8,173 drugstores located in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Walgreens’ digital business includes walgreens.com, drugstore.com, beauty.com, skinstore.com and visiondirect.com. Walgreens also manages more than 400 health-care clinic and provider-practice locations throughout the country.