PROF. DR. CHRIS VERVAET

Chris Vervaet is a pharmacist and obtained his PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences at Ghent University in 1997. After a post-doc in the Aerosol Research Group at the Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, Virginia, US) he was appointed in 2000 as professor at the Department of Pharmaceutics (Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Ghent University). Since 2013 he is chair of the Department of Pharmaceutics, and since 2015 he is director of the Laboratory of Pharmaceutical technology. His research focuses on drug delivery, more specifically on the development of innovative solid dosage forms for oral applications. His fields of expertise are drug compounding, pharmaceutical technology, sustained drug release, continuous manufacturing, granulation/tableting, hot-melt extrusion and extrusion/spheronisation. His research intensively collaborates with equipment manufacturers as well as pharmaceutical companies for the introduction of continuous manufacturing within the pharmaceutical industry, e.g. continuous wet granulation, continuous feeding/blending, continuous freeze drying. The department is affiliated with several international research clusters, e.g. the Pharmaceutical Solid State Research Cluster (with partners from Helsinki, Lille, Leuven, Dusseldorf, Cambridge, Graz, Otago, Lisbon, Ljubljana and Copenhagen) and the Interreg IMODE cluster (with members of Lille, East Anglia, London, Greenwich and Cambridge). He has supervised 38 PhD students (since 2000), published about 260 internationally peer reviewed articles and 8 books chapters, and has filed 19 patent applications. He is member of the board of the Belgian Society of Pharmaceutical Sciences (since 2013), and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Drug Delivery Science and Technology and the International Journal of Pharmaceutics.