Heather Barkholtz, PhD, assistant professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy and Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene (WSLH) stands in the WSLH Forensic Toxicology laboratory where testing is performed for some of her research.
Assistant Professor Heather Barkholtz holds a unique joint appointment with the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy and the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene Forensic Toxicology section.
The UW-Madison Pharmacy School recently published an article detailing Dr. Barkholtz’s efforts “… to expand the limited research on drug impairment and develop better tools of detection for illegal substances. That would help both law enforcement and her colleagues at WSLH, the state’s public health laboratory that processes nearly 90 percent of samples from impaired drivers statewide.” Article link
From the article –
“I’m the only faculty member studying forensic toxicology in the country who works alongside actual state practitioners,” she (Barkholtz) notes. “That means that we have great insight into what their pain points are and what they struggle with, and then that leads to our research. One of the things we’re working on is developing new ways to detect drugs of abuse in biological specimens, meaning blood or urine, and we’re trying to find methods that can detect a wide variety of different drugs in a short amount of time because we receive so many samples from across the state.”