Ravi Shanker, PhD, is a Senior Research Fellow in Pharmaceutical Sciences, with 25 years of experience at Pfizer Worldwide Research & Development. He has been involved in the development of several successful drug delivery technologies utilizing and applying fundamental principles of physical chemistry, physics, biology and biopharmaceutics. Dr. Shanker had developed platform techniques, such as solid form selection, as well as platform drug delivery technologies, such as spray dried solid dispersions, that have been widely used to advance numerous, structurally-diverse molecules with intractable physicochemical properties and utilized by the pharmaceutical industry at large. He has published numerous papers and has many issued patents in the field of drug delivery.

Dr. Shanker received a B. Pharm and M. Pharm. from Banaras Hindu University, India and an MS and PhD in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the University of Kansas. He has mentored PhD dissertation research for students in the United States and United Kingdom, and taught graduate courses as an adjunct faculty member. Dr. Shanker has collaborated with academic researchers and entrepreneurial companies for enhanced fundamental understanding of drug delivery and reduction to practice of drug delivery technologies, respectively.

Dr. Shanker has been an invited speaker at numerous national and international conferences and served as a member of the Editorial Board of Journal of Pharmaceutical Science for 15 years. His current responsibilities include leading a global Biopharmaceutics Group at Pfizer. Dr. Shanker’s current research interests include, but are not limited to, the following categories: the use of advanced physical chemistry principles for molecular design for optimizing solubility; dissolution rate and permeability; utilization of nanotechnology constructs for tissue targeting and intracellular delivery; optimization of pharmacokinetic profiles of drugs to maximize pharmacodynamic outcomes; creation and sustainment of supersaturated solutions of drugs and drug products; understanding and maximizing the oral absorption of drugs for optimal PK and PK-PD outcomes especially for molecules with intractable physicochemical properties and the advancement of the concepts of integrated systems based pharmaceutics for a holistic understanding between manufacturing processes and performance of drug products in subjects.