Professor Thomas Rades

Since March 2012 Professor Thomas Rades is the Research Chair in Pharmaceutical Design and Drug Delivery in the Department of Pharmacy, University of Copenhagen. Before that he has been the Chair in Pharmaceutical Sciences at the National School of Pharmacy at Otago University in New Zealand.

In 1994 he received a PhD from the University of Braunschweig, Germany for his work on thermotropic and lyotropic liquid crystalline drugs. After working as a Research Scientist in the Preclinical Development and Formulation at F. Hoffmann-La Roche in Basel, Switzerland, he became a Senior Lecturer in Pharmaceutical Sciences at Otago in 1999 and since 2003 held the Chair in Pharmaceutical Sciences in Otago.

Professor Rades has developed an international reputation for his research in the physical characterization of drugs and solid dosage forms as well as in vaccine delivery using nanoparticulate systems (both polymeric and lipid based). He has published more than 500 papers in international peer reviewed journals as well as 17 book chapters, 13 patents and 3 books.

Professor Rades is an Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Pharmaceutics and Biopharmaceutics. He holds honorary doctorates of Åbo Akademi University, Finland, and Helsinki University, Finland and an honorary professorship at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He is an Eminent Fellow of the Academy of Pharmaceutical Sciences (UK), a Fellow of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS, US), the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry (NZ) and a member of the College of Fellows of the Controlled Release Society (CRS).

Professor Rades has successfully supervised more than 80 PhD students. For his undergraduate and postgraduate teaching he was awarded the New Zealand Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award for Sustained Excellence (2005).

His research interests include The solid state of drugs and dosage forms, and lipid based and nanoparticulate delivery systems. Research in both areas aims to improve drug therapy through appropriate formulation and characterization of medicines and to increase our understanding of the physico-chemical properties of drugs and medicines. It combines physical, chemical, and biological sciences and technology with analytics to optimally formulate drugs.

Current research projects include: Amorphous drugs, Co-amorphous drug delivery systems, Drug solubility in polymers, advanced lipid-based drug delivery systems.