Paula Lukas

Paula Lukas graduated from UW-Milwaukee with a degree in Psychology in 1975. Not wishing to go to graduate school in Psychology, she took a job as a research technician in Pharmacology at the University of Tennessee Center for the Health Sciences in Memphis, intending to later attend medical school. After spending a year in Memphis, she returned to Milwaukee to attend the nascent program in Biomedical Engineering at Marquette University. Having a degree, she was invited to enter as a graduate student but preferred instead to enter as an undergraduate. While attending Marquette, she worked as a co-op Engineering student for General Electric Medical Systems (now GE Healthcare). During her 10 years at GE, she was in sales, marketing, and sales and applications training. She predominantly worked in CT and MRI and produced videos that taught the use of software updates for MRI systems. While at GE, she lived in Kansas City, the Fort Lauderdale area, and Milwaukee. After leaving GE, she worked for a few years for companies outside of diagnostic imaging before taking a job with Picker International, a company that has since been acquired by Philips. Her first job with Picker International relocated her to Singapore, where she worked with distributors throughout the Asia Pacific. She covered the countries from India to Guam, from China to New Zealand, fulfilling a lifelong goal of international travel. After slightly over 2 years in Asia, she relocated to Germany for an additional 2 years, where she worked with distributors from Iceland to South Africa. When she returned to the United States, she had a job that convinced her that it was time to return to school to do something different. Her ideal job would be one in a medically related field that used her science background, where she could “clock out” at the end of the day and not take it home with her. While driving home, she passed a pharmacy being built, and it occurred to her that a pharmacy would be ideal. At that time, UW-Madison had the only pharmacy school in the state and was about to transition to PharmD degrees. The next entry class had already been selected, so she had to wait a year and a half before entering. During that time, she took several prerequisite courses. She married in 1999 and graduated as a Doctor of Pharmacy in 2001.