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Ronald Hills

Ron Hills, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Administration

Location

Pharmacy Building, Rm 305
Eligible for Student Opportunities

Ron Hills is a tenured faculty in the Westbrook College of Health Professions. Since his initial appointment in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences & Administration, he has taught courses in biochemistry, medicinal chemistry, pharmacology, evidence-based medicine, biostatistics, and/or data science. Dr. Hills' scientific training was in biochemistry and multiscale computational modeling. After spending a decade in the School of Pharmacy, his scholarly interests evolved to include the role of lipids and nutraceuticals in chronic health and disease. In his teaching Dr. Hills strives to illustrate the power of integrative medicine for optimizing health outcomes. Students working with Dr. Hills' learn how to develop predictive computational models and perform meta-analyses of the current research literature. Prior to joining UNE, Dr. Hills was a National Institutes of Health Kirschstein Research Fellow at the University of Utah.

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Credentials

Education

Ph.D., Biophysics
Scripps Research Institute
2008
B.S., Summa Cum Laude, Biochemistry
Florida State University
2003

Expertise

  • Biochemistry
  • Cardiovascular disease
  • Medicinal chemistry
  • Nutrition
  • Pharmacology
  • Protein structure and function
  • Scientific computing
  • Team-based learning

Post-Doctoral Training

NIH Kirschstein Postdoctoral Research Fellow, 2009-2010
University of Utah, 2008-2010

Research

Selected publications

White, A.M.B., H.R. Mishcon, J.L. Redwanski and R.D. Hills Jr. 2020. Statin treatment in specific patient groups: Role for improved cardiovascular risk markers. Journal of Clinical Medicine 9:3748.  

Hills Jr., R.D., B.A. Pontefract, H.R. Mishcon, C.A. Black, S.C. Sutton and C.R. Theberge. 2019. Gut microbiome: Profound implications for diet and disease. Nutrients 11:1613. 2021 Best Paper Award, 

Hills Jr., R.D. 2018. Refining amino acid hydrophobicity for dynamics simulation of membrane proteins. PeerJ 6:e4230.  

Fosso-Tande, J., C. Black, S.G. Aller, L. Lu and R.D. Hills Jr. 2017. Simulation of lipid-protein interactions with the CgProt force field. AIMS Molecular Science 4:352-69.  

Hills Jr., R.D. and N. McGlinchey. 2016. Model parameters for simulation of physiological lipids. Journal of Computational Chemistry 37:1112-18.  

Research interests

Lipids and nutraceuticals
Lipid-protein interactions
Multiscale modeling