Stanley Shaw, a 1957 graduate of the SDSU College of Pharmacy and Allied Health Professions and an early leader in the field of nuclear pharmacy, died Oct. 26, 2019, at Mulberry Healthcare Center in Mulberry, Indiana, at age 84.
Born July 4, 1935, in Parkston, the soft-spoken Shaw received the award for Distinguished Service to Education from the SDSU Alumni Association in 1991. He was honored as SDSU College of Pharmacy Distinguished Alumnus in 2006. Shaw was installed as 2018-19 honorary president of the American Pharmacists Association at its annual convention in Nashville, Tennessee.
Shaw spent much of his entire career (1962-2005) at the Purdue College of Pharmacy, which has one of only a half-dozen nuclear pharmacy training programs in the United States.
Shaw worked with other nuclear pharmacists and American Pharmacists Association staff members to make nuclear pharmacy the first practice area recognized as a specialty by the Board of Pharmacy Specialties in 1978.
Shaw intended to earn his degree, become a community pharmacist in Minnesota and fish for walleye. That changed when pharmacy practice department head Harold Bailey and faculty member Norval Webb convinced him to go to graduate school at State. He worked with Bailey conducting research on radioactivity (“I’d never heard of itâ€) and earned a master’s in pharmaceutical chemistry in 1959.
Shaw taught at State in 1960-61 and 1961-62 while working with Bailey on a research project for his doctorate from Purdue. In 1962 he earned his doctorate in pharmaceutical chemistry with an emphasis in research with radioactivity.
He spent the remainder of his career at Purdue, where the professor retired as head of Division of Nuclear Pharmacy. He started its nuclear pharmacy training program in 1972.
To illustrate Shaw’s legacy, he received the Founders Award from the Academy of Pharmacy Practice in 1981, which was 24 years before he retired. In 1998, he received the Distinguished Achievement Award in Nuclear Pharmacy Practice. In 2000, he received the Smith Practice Excellence Award from the American Pharmaceutical Association for his work in nuclear pharmacy. He also is a fellow of the American Pharmaceutical Association.
Survivors include his wife of 58 years, Excellda, a retail pharmacist in the Purdue area most of her life, three daughters and four grandchildren.
