After over three decades of serving in various roles within the College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences (CPHS), Dr. John Rovers, Professor of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, has concluded his career at Drake University and will officially retire in December of 2026.
A native of Canada, Dr. Rovers first moved to Iowa in 1991. He began his career in pharmacy, receiving his undergraduate degree and completing a drug information residency at the University of Toronto before going to Boston, Mass. to receive his PharmD at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Allied Health Sciences and complete a fellowship at Northeastern University.
Dr. Rovers’ first position back in Canada in 1988 was in hospital pharmacy. However, his role as a manager left him spending more time supervising other pharmacists than working with patients. He began seeking out other roles and stumbled upon an ad for Drake, chuckling at the idea of moving to Iowa.
“I interviewed for the job,” Dr. Rovers said. “I really liked the place. I must say that the people were lovely. That’s about all I can say. They were just really nice people.”
When Dr. Rovers was first hired, his position was split between Drake and Mercy Hospital. He taught antibiotics in the therapeutics program at Drake and worked with students on rotation for infectious disease at Mercy. However, the half-and-half positions weren’t suiting either institution well, so Mercy’s Director of Pharmacy and Drake’s Dean at the time, Katherine Russi, got together and decided to have faculty choose one of the two places. That was 1993, and Dr. Rovers has been a full-time faculty member at Drake ever since.
Though Dr. Rovers was now settled at Drake, the pharmacy profession was rapidly evolving. With the advent of managed care, pharmacy reimbursement was going down, while drug costs were continuing to increase. There was an urgent need for pharmacists to learn what to do when those lines crossed. Dr. Rovers became part of what started as a statewide effort, which became national and then international, to modernize pharmacy practice and education to focus less on the prescription and more on the patient.
“Pharmacists across Iowa were told, ‘Look, the profession is changing. We don’t really know how to react. We’re not asking for your help. We’re telling you you’re going to help,’” Dr. Rovers recalled.
For about a decade, Dr. Rovers’ work revolved around this practice change model. He fondly remembers a time when him and former faculty member Harry Hagel would spend hours in their offices exchanging ideas across the hallway on what was working and what wasn’t as they tried to figure out how the new model could function. Dr. Rovers described this collaborative effort as “two bodies, one brain.”
Dr. Rovers spent significant time teaching issues related to the practice change model, as well as several other clinical pharmacy courses, such as antibiotics and immunology. However, as his time in practice wound down, his focus began to shift. CPHS and the College of Arts and Sciences were preparing to launch a new concentration in Global and Comparative Public Health, and he knew he wanted to be involved. In 2009, he took a sabbatical and pursued a Master’s in International Public Health in Australia.
“I see healthcare from 30,000 feet,” Dr. Rovers said. “And public health allows for that. You don’t look after a person, you look after a community.”
Since then, Dr. Rovers has taught courses in introductory public health, public health in developing countries, strategic program planning for public health, and more. Watching public health professionals work tirelessly through the pandemic strengthened his passion for the field. He has sought to not only teach public health, but expand its visibility. He serves as a board member for the Iowa Public Health Association.
Dr. Rovers has continued to teach bits and pieces of pharmacy as well as his public health coursework. He has helped create and supervised study abroad opportunities for P4 students in New Zealand, Australia, the Caribbean, and Central America. More recently, he played a part in the creation of the Bachelor of Health Sciences in Public Health program within the CPHS Health Sciences department. In the last couple of years, he has enjoyed teaching courses on health systems and quantitative literacy in John Dee Bright College.
“That, to me, has been the absolute joy of being here,” Dr. Rovers said. “I’ve had the freedom to develop professionally and personally, and I think that is pretty unique for college faculty.”
Though Dr. Rovers’ time at Drake is coming to an end, his work in advancing public health is not quite finished. He is walking out the door as a sub-grantee on a National Institutes of Health R21 grant to conduct research on medication adherence in men with HIV and another chronic illness alongside Michael Miller, a past Drake faculty member and current research scientist at Kaiser Permanente.
Outside of continuing to pursue this project as an Emeritus Faculty member for the first couple years of his retirement, Dr. Rovers is looking forward to sleeping and, in his own words, desperately learning how to play the guitar.
Throughout the 33 years Dr. Rovers has spent serving in his various roles with the College, he has watched generations of students continue to show up for their education through tumultuous world and life events. His last piece of advice for students is to get off their own backs and give themselves a little bit of grace.
“A little grace and forgiveness from us all to each other would not go badly,” Dr. Rovers said. “The faculty at this University want more than anything to see you succeed. That’s why we’re here.”