Saghir Akhtar

Saghir Akhtar is professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, Faculty of Medicine, Kuwait University, and editor in chief of the Journal of Drug Targeting.

Akhtar obtained a First Class honours degree in Pharmacy from the Leicester School of Pharmacy and his PhD degree from the University of Bath. From 1990-1991, he held a post-doctoral fellowship at UNC Medical School at Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He began his independent academic career at Aston University, firstly as lecturer from 1991–1997 and then as Reader in Pharmaceutical Sciences (1997–1999). He led a team studying DNA chip technology with a hope of combatting a form of brain cancer known as glioma. In 1997, he was a visiting fellow with Ed Southern in the Department of Biochemistry, Oxford University. He later became professor of Drug Delivery in the Welsh School of Pharmacy and Director for the Centre for Genome-based Therapeutics, Cardiff University, UK (2002–2006).

He is the winner of the Lilly Prize (1996), the Pfizer Academic Award (1997), the British Pharmaceutical Conference Science Medal (1998), the Controlled Release Society (USA) Young Investigator Research Achievement Award (2001) and the Kappa Society Science Award (2005).