Dr L. Lie-A-Huen (1954) has been appointed Professor of Clinical Pharmacy in the Faculty of Medicine (AMC-UvA) of the University of Amsterdam (UvA).

Loraine Lie-A-Huen's research is focused on the specific field of medication in the context of patient safety. She wants to establish an evidence-based collaboration between a clinical pharmacy team, specialists and nurses in a hospital setting. It is her belief that the interventions made by a hospital pharmacist and by other staff within the pharmacy department lead to a higher quality of patient care. Two other important focuses in her research are investigator initiated pharmaceutical research (in which the initiative comes from the researcher) within the AMC, and clinical pharmacological research on the relationship between the pharmacodynamic (the theory of the pharmacological effects of substances on the body) and pharmacokinetic (the theory of the way in which medicine is processed in the body) properties of specific risky drugs administered to risky patients, with the goal of individualising dosing for the patient.

In 2007 Lie-A-Huen began offering the elective Patient Safety, and in particular medication safety, as part of the Curius programme, the curriculum of the medical training programme. She finds it important that medical students realize early on in their studies what role they play in terms of professional behaviour and multidisciplinary collaboration with hospital pharmacists.

The fact that the AMC has named a chair in Clinical Pharmacy for the first time provides Lie-A-Huen, as the first female professor-hospital pharmacist, with the extra challenge of realising her ambitions in collaboration with her colleagues in the AMC pharmacy.

Lie-A-Huen has worked as head of the pharmacy and instructor in Clinical Pharmacy at the AMC since 2004. She was trained at St. Antonius Hospital in Utrecht, and after that in Nieuwegein. Following her training she kept working at the St. Antonius Hospital as a hospital pharmacist and clinical pharmacologist from 1982 to 2000. She obtained her PhD from the University of Groningen in 1991 with a dissertation entitled Pharmacokinetics and Clinical Pharmacology of Flecainide in episodic treatment of paroxysmal atrial fibrillation.

Together with the Cardiology and Anaesthesia department, she set up a clinical pharmacological research programme from within the hospital pharmacy that aimed at more effective treatment of patients with antiarrythmics (medication to treat heart rhythm disorders), and anaesthetics, in particular Propofol. At the St. Antonius Hospital she made her name with the creation of a Clinical Pharmacy department for multiple hospitals in the Utrecht region, and with the establishment of a Clinical Pharmacologist distinction within the training programme for hospital pharmacists. She is chair of the pharmaceutical patient care committee of the professional association for Dutch hospital pharmacists.