Finance professor provides insider’s view of FDA operations

Students studying with John Vernon are gaining an extraordinary insider's view of how economic policy is developed at the highest levels of the federal government.

In addition to teaching, Vernon, an assistant professor of finance and an expert on financial aspects of the pharmaceutical industry, spends one week a month on loan to the federal Food and Drug Administration in Washington, D.C.

There, he is a senior economic policy advisor to the FDA and to the agency's commissioner, Andrew von Eschenbach.

Vernon has testified before committees of the U.S. Congress about his research on the economic consequences of re-importing U.S. drugs from other nations, specifically the regulation of drug prices from nations that have cost controls on drugs.

Initially, the FDA tried to entice Vernon into taking a full-time position.

"I did not want to leave academia, but I was very interested in government policy and working with the FDA," he says.

Vernon, who also holds a joint faculty appointment in community medicine at the UConn Health Center, says his students enjoy learning how theories taught in the classroom play out in actual practice.

"It's enriching what we teach in the classroom theoretically. The real beneficiaries of my work are UConn students," he says.