Dr. Nicholas A Peppas, the Fletcher Stuckey Pratt Chair in Engineering and professor of chemical engineering, biomedical engineering and pharmaceutics at The University of Texas at Austin, has been elected a member of the French Academy of Pharmacy (Académie nationale de pharmacie). He will be inducted in a special ceremony in Paris on June 1, 2005 when he will give an inaugural lecture on the “Future of Intelligent Therapeutics.”
Founded on August 3, 1803 by Antoine Parmentier and Pierre Berthelot, the French Academy has 90 resident members in five sections. Peppas was elected in the Pharmacology Section and is one of only three U.S. members of the Academy. Peppas’s research association with the francophone world has been long and fruitful. He served as a visiting professor at the University of Paris (1986) and the University of Geneva (1982), has published numerous publications in French and has been active in collaborative research with French companies and with the Universities of Paris, Lyons, Lille and Dijon.
Dr. Peppas is a world authority in pharmaceutical sciences and controlled drug delivery. He has been at the University of Texas since January 2003 and directs the Laboratory of Biomaterials, Drug Delivery, Bionanotechnology and Molecular Recognition. He is recognized as the father of modern drug delivery and his induction to the Academy acknowledges his pioneering work on sustained and controlled release systems, or delivery of drugs and proteins in the body. Peppas has authored 30 books or edited volumes and 900 publications. He is also the inventor of several drug delivery systems and devices described in 30 international patents. Some of these patents have been licensed to pharmaceutical and chemical companies.
Dr. Peppas has received more than 100 major awards. In 2002 he received the Dale Wurster Award in Pharmaceutics from American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists and the Eurand Award in Oral Delivery from the Controlled Release Society, the two premier U.S. awards of the pharmaceutical sciences and engineering field.
He has served at various times on the Board of Directors or Scientific Advisory Boards of more than 25 companies. Dr. Peppas has received honorary doctorates from the University of Ghent (Belgium), the University of Parma (Italy) and the University of Athens (Greece). As an educator, Peppas has directed the theses of 62 Ph.D. students, including 27 current professors in other universities. His former students include many industrial leaders in pharmaceutical or medical companies.
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