Donor Profile:
Paulette Najarian–Knight, BSPharm’80

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ig challenges don’t intimidate Paulette Najarian–Knight, BSPharm’80. In fact, she revels in them.

At the age of 25, when the current generation of pharmacy students are still finishing their PharmD degree requirements, Najarian–Knight and a friend co–launched their own long–term care pharmacy business. Parlaying contacts developed while working as a consultant pharmacist at Geriatric Pharmacy in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., she and a core group of fellow risk–takers built Q.D. Pharmacy into a thriving $4.5 million company before selling it to Arbor Health Care in 1997. Najarian–Knight then joined the firm as president.

Through multiple mergers, acquisitions, and changes of management, Najarian–Knight has remained with the parent firm, Omnicare, as an executive.

For the past six years, she has been vice president of customer relations at Livonia, Mich.–based Specialized Pharmacy, Inc. (SPI), an Omnicare subsidiary. In this capacity, she manages a group of customer relations representatives, mostly nurses, who act as liaisons between the firm’s pharmacy operations and the 300 long–term care facilities, hospitals, and assisted–living facilities SPI serves throughout Michigan. Najarian– Knight also creates policies and procedures for the pharmacy and serves on various quality improvement committees.

“I’m doing a lot of the same things now that I did when I owned my own longterm care pharmacy: visiting facilities, assisting with medication issues, and trying to keep the customer satisfied,”Najarian–Knight says. “Things don’t happen quite as quickly in a big corporation as they did when I was running a smaller company, but my passion for long–term care pharmacy hasn’t changed.”

Najarian–Knight remarks that she was in the sixth grade when she chose a career in pharmacy.

“My mom showed me a newspaper article about a female pharmacist,” Najarian–Knight recalls. “The article said that you have to like chemistry, a topic which fascinated me even at that age. So I hung on to the article and never wavered off of the pharmacy path.”

She set her sights on U–M early, too.

“I was a college football fan even as a kid, and U–M was a bigtime football school,”she laughs. “The fact that Michigan’s Pharmacy program was also one of the best became more important to me later on.”

Last fall, Najarian–Knight was elected to a three–year term (2006–2009) on the College’s Alumni Society Board of Governors.

“I like being involved in the College and the University,”she explains. “I hope to help make a difference and to help promote the College in whatever ways I can.”

In 2005, Paulette established the Najarian Scholarship Fund at the College to support the educational goals of PharmD students. She explains why.

“My parents always valued education and encouraged their children to perform at our best level in order to achieve what we wanted in life,”Najarian–Knight says. “That was a liberating concept for me. Despite the fact that my parents saved for my college education from when I was very young, the costs still far outweighed their means. So I ended up having to finance my own education. I established the scholarship in my family name for two reasons: to honor my parents’ belief in the power of education; and to help future Michigan Pharmacists achieve their life and career goals.

“My Michigan Pharmacy education encouraged independent thinking and leadership,”adds Najarian–Knight. “It gave me tools to succeed and the confidence that I could do it. I draw upon my Michigan Pharmacy education every day when confronted with problem–solving situations in a fast–paced, highly regulated environment. Giving back to the College is an expression of my appreciation.”

E–mail: qdp@umich.edu.