School of Pharmacy alum credits UNE education for ‘being a lifelong learner’ in professional career

Justin Richards, Pharm.D. ’19, always knew he wanted to work with animals, but his path to becoming a pharmacist had many twists and turns.

“I grew up always hunting, fishing, hiking, I was in Boy Scouts, and just interacting a lot with wildlife,” said Richards, who initially wanted to study wildlife biology until he took some pre-med classes at the beginning of his undergraduate education. “I saw a path forward where I was going to work with animals, but then I realized pharmacology was worth pursuing.”

Richards, who grew up in the western Maine town of Dixfield, is currently a veterinary pharmacist at Portland-based Covetrus. His job is to process prescriptions from veterinary offices and ensure they're safe and appropriate, then mail them directly to the animal’s owner or caretaker.

“The overarching goal is to ensure all the medications we dispense to our patients are safe and effective, which is just the same you see in human health, except we cover a large array of different species,” Richards said.

Initially, his perception of a career in pharmacy was limited, with only the “corner store pharmacist” as a reference. But that perception provided enough inspiration for him to enroll in UNE’s School of Pharmacy.

“I had this sole course in my mind that I was just going to be a retail pharmacist,” Richards said, adding that the professors at the UNE School of Pharmacy introduced him to the dozens of career paths available to pharmacists, including veterinary pharmacy, which allows him to combine his two passions – medicine and animals.

“From the get-go, UNE showed us the different pathways. From day one, it was very apparent that there was much more than being a retail pharmacist available to us.”

Richards graduated just months before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when pharmacies “became the front lines of the biggest health crisis we’ve seen in our generation,” Richards said.

Richards credits his UNE education for helping him navigate the coronavirus pandemic, noting that his professors instilled in him to be a lifelong learner.

“I learned how to appropriately research and find reputable information to be able to make clinical calls when there isn’t necessarily a right or wrong answer,” Richards said. “In veterinary pharmacy, a lot of those answers are in the gray area.”