Gaia Herbs: Plant Intelligence

Gaia Herbs is one of my two elective APPE rotations. The headquarter of Gaia Herbs is located in Brevard, North Carolina where everything happens from growing herbs, manufacturing, quality control, quality assurance, research and development. The first two days in Gaia Herbs, I was given a tour of the Gaia farms which provide 25 percent of the raw materials used in Gaia products, manufacturing site, labeling and packaging, raw material warehouse, and research and development lab. It was such a unique experience to see all the process that go from herbs to finished final products. I spent most of my six weeks preparing samples to run in HPLC machine and processing the data for statistical analysis. By the end of this rotation, I gained much more knowledge from working on HPLC machine and data processing. I also learn a lot from everyone working in the lab. It was such a pleasure to work with all the folks from the lab for this 6 weeks period. My preceptor, Jeremy Stewart was a great resource and very knowledgeable in his field. This is definitely research based site and it would be more ideal for students who are interested in research type pharmaceutical industry.

Overall, it was a pleasant rotation with great folks and I learned a lot of research techniques by working with HPLC and data processing. Even though it is not traditional pharmacy rotation, it is worthwhile for new research experience.