Pradeep Kumar

A/Prof. Pradeep Kumar (BPharm, MPharm, PhD) is currently an Associate Professor of Pharmaceutics at Wits’ Department of Pharmacy and Pharmacology. A/Prof. Kumar has an experience of over 10 years in academic teaching and research with pharmaceutics as the core subject along with biomaterial design, tissue engineering, and nanomedicine. His PhD thesis was focused on the design and development of Polymer-Engineered Neural Devices for potential application in reducing neurological deficits after spinal cord injuries and was awarded the Wits Faculty of Health Sciences’ Most Prestigious PhD Degree Award (2017/18). In addition, he is interested in the in silico mathematical analysis and programming for performance interpretation of drug eluting assemblies and polymer architectures. He holds a Y1 rating from the NRF.

A/Prof. Kumar is a recipient of several prestigious awards including ALBA-FKNE-YIBRO diversity grant (2020), Global Young Academy Membership (2020), INGSA-Africa Science Advice diploma (2020), Wits’ Friedel Sellschop Research Award (2019), South African Young Academy of Science Membership (2018), ASRT (Egypt) Young African Researcher Award 2018 (Category: Health and Pharmaceutical Sciences), Mail & Guardian’s Top 200 Young South Africans 2018 (Category: Science and Technology), Golden Key International Honours Society Membership (2018), Claude Leon Foundation Merit Award (2018), African-German Network of Excellence in Science (AGNES) Junior Researcher Grant (2018) funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the German Ministry of Education and Research, Society of Pharmaceutical Education and Research’s Young Scientist Award at PST 2018, Wits Innovators Forum’s First-time (2013), Prolific (2014) and International (2016) Inventor Awards, International Society of Developmental Neuroscience Scholarship (2012), and Elsevier’s NanoToday PhD student Award (2011). Three of his publications have won the best pharmaceutics paper award at PSSA conference (2013, 2014, and 2015) and eight of his presentations have won best oral/poster presentation including two young researcher awards. He was a recipient of the prestigious Prime Minister’s Scholarship (Ministry of Defence, Govt. of India) and an AICTE (India) fellowship during his MPharm.

A/Prof. Kumar’s research findings have been published as over 225 ISI publications (H-index: 33), 4 editorials, 3 edited books, and 34 book chapters in the area of biomaterials, pharmaceutics, and molecular modelling. He has proudly presented his research across the globe (USA, France, Spain, Australia, Denmark, Canada, Thailand, Russia, and India). To date he has co-supervised 8 PhD students to graduation and currently co-supervising 09 doctoral projects. A/Prof. Kumar is an inventor on 12 granted patents (5 USA, 3 Eur, 2 Chinese, 1 Japan, 1 India). His research has been funded by NRF, SAMRC, Technology Innovation Agency, Claude Leon Foundation, Wits’ FRC and URC. A/Prof. Kumar is on expert reviewer panel of various national and international funding agencies such as National Research Foundation (Singapore), Claude Leon Foundation, EDCTP, Agence Nationale de la Recherche (France), Euregio Science Fund, and the NRF (South Africa). He is on the reviewer panel of over 85 scientific journals with over 500 reviews. For his reviewer contributions, A/Prof. Kumar was placed among Top Reviewers in 4 categories (Publons Global Peer Review Awards 2018 and 2019), is recognized as an Excellent Reviewer on Publons. He is an Assoc Editor of the journal 3 BioTech. A/Prof. Kumar, a registered pharmacist, is a member of several prestigious societies such as CRS, ISN, FENS, ESN, SAYAS, RSSAf, SASCA, TERMIS, ISID, Eur Peptide Soc, Int Chem Biol Soc and the Soc for the Advancement of Sci in Africa.