Two pharmaceutical sciences faculty to be honored with UB Exceptional Scholar Awards

Murali Ramanathan, professor, pharmaceutical sciences, and director, graduate studies, has been selected as the 2016 recipient of the Exceptional Scholar Sustained Achievement Award. Ramanathan has been a member of the SPPS faculty since 1994, achieving rank of full professor in 2010. He is also a UB professor of neurology.

His research program focuses on identifying and characterizing the interactions among patient-specific, environmental and genetic factors that contribute to inter-individual differences in disease progression in multiple sclerosis. His scholarship and research also includes the pharmacokinetic/ pharmacodynamics modeling of pharmacogenomics data and integration of data for target identification.

Ramanathan has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Whitaker Prize for Multiple Sclerosis Research of the Consortium of Multiple Sclerosis Centers in 2005 and Stephen H. Kelley Award, National Multiple Sclerosis Society Western New York Chapter in 2013. He is the author of 135 journal publications, nine referred reviews, seven book chapters, one e-book and two patents.

The Exceptional Scholar Award for Sustained Achievement was created by the University at Buffalo in 2002 to honor outstanding professional achievement that has been focused on a particular body of work over a number of years. This award was created to recognize an unprecedented accomplishment in a senior scholar's career, distinguishing a body of work of enduring importance that has gone beyond the norm in a particular field of study.

Dhaval K. Shah, assistant professor, pharmaceutical sciences, has been selected as the recipient of ‪the 2016 Exceptional Scholar Young Investigator Award. A former PhD student in the pharmaceutical sciences department, Shah joined the SPPS faculty in 2013 after returning from Pfizer Inc.

His research relates to the discovery and development of novel protein therapeutics, including monoclonal antibodies, bispecific antibodies, and antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), for treatment of cancer and metabolic diseases. Shah's work on ADCs provided the foundation for model-based drug development of these therapies across the pharmaceutical industry and was recognized by the American Association of Pharmaceutical Sciences (AAPS) as an "Outstanding Manuscript in Modeling and Simulation."

Shah’s high level grantsmanship and research productivity is evident by his recent receipt of a $1.5 million NIH R01 award titled "Translational Systems Pharmacokinetic Models of Novel Anticancer Biologics." He has also received several internal school-based research equipment and seed funding awards, as well and grants from the pharmaceutical industry.

Shah has published more than 20 full-length peer-reviewed tier-one journal articles, two book chapters, and has made more than 50 poster presentations at major scientific meetings. He is the only two-time recipient of the AAPS Outstanding Manuscript Award in Modeling and Simulation (2010 and 2014).

Introduced in 2002, the University at Buffalo's Exceptional Scholar Award for Young Investigators celebrates a recent superior achievement of a scholar in his/her field of study. Such an achievement will have distinguished the recipient as an up-and-coming scholar, as well as earned the individual acclaim for his/her work, which could be a published work or other scholastic or artistic endeavor.