People

Philip Empey, PharmD, PhD

Philip Empey, PharmD, PhD

Associate Director, Pharmacogenomics


Dr. Philip Empey is the Associate Director for Pharmacogenomics of the Pitt/UPMC Institute for Precision Medicine and leads the PreCISE-Rx and Test2Learn teams to implement pharmacogenomics clinical, research, and educational initiatives. He also directs the University of Pittsburgh – Thermo Fisher Scientific Pharamcogenomics Center of Excellence which is deploying population scale preemptive pharmagenomics testing (to >150,000 patients) in western Pennsylvania. As a clinician-scientist in the Department of Pharmacy and Therapeutics, Dr. Empey conducts NIH-funded clinical and translational research aimed at understanding the mechanisms of the variability in drug response to improve medication-related outcomes in critically-ill patients.

He received his PharmD from the University of Rhode Island and completed PGY1 and PGY2 residencies in Pharmacy Practice and Critical Care at the University of Kentucky. He earned a PhD in Clinical Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Kentucky before completing postdoctoral research training at the University of Pittsburgh.

Dr Empey’s current research interests include understanding the role/impact of xenobiotic transporters following neurological injury, transporter pharmacogenomics, pharmacogenomics clinical implementation, collection of medication-related phenotype information, and genotype-phenotype discovery. Dr. Empey teaches at the graduate level in pharmacokinetics, pharmacogenomics, and drug transporters in the Schools of Pharmacy, Medicine, and Nursing. He also has a research interest in innovative educational models to transform education.