Pharmacy research
RAE 2008 - the results
See how our pharmacy research scored in the Research and Assessment Exercise 2008.
The University is well known as a centre of excellence for healthcare education, so setting up a School of Pharmacy within the Faculty of Health and Human Sciences was a natural progression.
Foundation Professor Soraya Dhillon was appointed in 2004 and the MPharm degree programme was successfully launched in September 2005 by the recruitment of 53 students.
RPSGB accreditation has been achieved for Steps 1-4 and this will annually until full accreditation is achieved when the first cohort of students graduate in summer 2009.
The School is building a strategic research framework for Pharmaceutics and drug delivery, pharmacy practice and pharmacy education.
The University is committed to providing significant support in terms of resources for this research and will do this by promoting strategic recruitment of both staff (up to 40 FTE over the next 4 years) and research students.
This is reflected by the recruitment of:
- Professor Dhillon (£156,000 grant income secured; 24 papers and 6 book chapters published together with 1 book edited during the census period)
- Professor Marc Brown , a renowned Pharmaceutics drug delivery expert formerly of the pharmaceutical Science Research Division, Kings College London (received in excess of £2 million of research funding and co-authored 32 papers and 4 book chapters during this RAE period)
- Professor Fabrizio Schifano , a Consultant psychiatrist and clinical pharmacologist from St Georges Medical School (£750,000 grant income secured; 30 papers, 16 book chapters and 24 commissioned reports published during the RAE period).
Such recruitment is also underpinned by the development of new state of the art laboratories costing in excess of £2.5 million in the School of Pharmacy which includes brand new analytical chemistry, synthetic chemistry, solid dosage form manufacture and characterisation and sterile manufacturing facilities and a simulation centre.
In addition, the School has recently completed refurbishment of the Topical Drug Delivery Unit (with co-funding with MedPharm Ltd, Guildford) to enable leading edge research in the development of dermal, ungual, airway and mucoadhesive drug delivery systems.
Research areas include
- Topical drug delivery
- Patient safety and pharmaco-vigilance
- Psychopharmacology and drug misuse
