Daniel Crona, Pharm.D., Ph.D.

Daniel J. Crona, Pharm.D., Ph.D., CPP is an associate professor in the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics in the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy. In 2006, he received his B.S. from the University of Colorado-Denver, where he majored in Biology and worked as a research associate at the University of Colorado Center for Genetic Lung Disease. In 2010, he received his Pharm.D. from the University of Colorado Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, where his honors research focused quantification of hormones and cytokines related to gastric motility in critically ill patients. In 2015, he received his Ph.D. from the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, and his dissertation focused on the identification and validation novel germline genetic variants that associated with survival in patients with advanced or metastatic kidney cancer treated with sorafenib. He finished his training as an NIGMS-funded post-doctoral fellow in the UNC/Duke/Hamner Institute collaborative T32 training program in clinical pharmacology.

Dr. Crona is registered pharmacist in the state of North Carolina, and is licensed as a Clinical Pharmacist Practitioner at the UNC Medical Center, where his clinical practice is focused on genitourinary malignancies, precision medicine and developmental therapeutics. He has been trained as a pharmaceutical scientist and clinical pharmacologist, with expertise in precision medicine/pharmacogenetics, developmental therapeutics, and epigenetics. His overarching career goal is to advance public health by integrating epigenetics, developmental therapeutics, and clinical pharmacology into clinical and translational research that optimizes treatment strategies for hematology/oncology patients. His highly collaborative translational research program is focused on a functional genomics paradigm that helps reveal molecular mechanisms that underlie the interplay between patient genotype, phenotype, and epigenetics. Molecular mechanistic information is then integrated with clinical pharmacology (e.g., pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics) to optimize drug selection and dosing. He has received funding from the Department of Defense, the National Institutes of Health, the American Cancer Society, the UNC Eshelman Institute for Innovation, the NC TraCS Institute, the American College of Clinical Pharmacy, the Hematology Oncology Pharmacy Association, IBM, and Merck.

Since the beginning of his faculty appointment at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy in 2015, Crona has been active in teaching and mentoring post-doctoral residents and fellows, graduate students, professional students, and undergraduates. He is the course director for DPET 822: “Advanced Clinical Pharmacy,” which is a unique, multi-semester offering for PhD students in the DPET clinical track. He has mentored or co-mentored 4 post-doctoral research associates, 6 PGY-2 hematology/oncology residency research projects, 5 PharmD honors students, 2 post-doctoral fellows on the UNC and Duke T32 in Clinical Pharmacology, and 11 industry-sponsored clinical post-doctoral fellows focused on drug development, medical affairs or clinical pharmacology/PKPD. He has served as the primary mentor to 2 PGY-1 residents at the UNC Medical Center, as well as a research mentor to 8 PGY-2 residents in hematology/oncology. He has graduate 1 PhD student and is currently the major research advisor for 1 DPET graduate student. Last, he is currently the mentor to several UNC undergraduates in the biology, chemistry and biochemistry departments.

Aside from his faculty appointment in the Division of Pharmacotherapy and Experimental Therapeutics, he has an active presence at the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center (UNC LCCC). He is faculty within the Molecular Therapeutics program, he is the only pharmacist on the UNC LCCC Data Safety Monitoring Committee, and he is a faculty member on both the UNC LCCC Molecular Tumor Board and the UNC LCCC Phase 1 research team. He is also a faculty within the UNC Chromatin and Epigenetics Program.