Professor Yahya E. Choonara is Chair and Head of the Department of Pharmacy and Pharmacology at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). He is a Personal Professor of Pharmaceutics and Co-Director of the Wits Advanced Drug Delivery Platform (WADDP) syndicate (Wits Health Consortium) and Principal Researcher of the WADDP Research Unit responsible for blueprinting innovation in partnership with research groups globally and pharmaceutical industry since 2007. He works at the forefront of conceptualizing targeted and personalized medicines to treat infectious, hereditary, and lifestyle diseases. His work helps reduce drug side-effects, improve the performance of pharmaceutical products and engineers new treatment interventions such as targeted chemotherapeutic and intraocular nanosystems, advanced drug delivery technologies, formulations for ultrafast and on-the-spot drug action, devices for neuro-trauma interventions and wound-healing technologies through de-novo tissue regeneration using 3D-bioprinting, neuro-biomaterials assembly, and tissue engineering principals. He has received prestigious awards in recognition of his pioneering work in establishing the concept of ‘PharMATHaceutics’ (a term that he has coined) to introduce complete optimization frameworks for various therapeutic interventions by merging Design of Experiments, Artificial Neural Networks, Atomistic Simulation and In Silico Molecular Modeling principals. He has graduated more than 60 postgraduates (cum laude) and mentors 12 postdoctoral fellows, many of whom have become his colleagues and are recipients of prestigious emerging researcher awards under his mentorship to continue making an impact in the pharmaceutical sciences.
