Viness Pillay

Viness Pillay
Professor
University of the Witwatersrand
South Africa

Biography

Prof. Pillay is a Personal (Full) Professor of Pharmaceutics, Head of Pharmaceutics and Director of Pharmaceutics and Contract Research at Wits, Department of Pharmacy and Pharmacology. Prof. Pillay was also awarded the Vice-Chancellor’s Research Award at the University of Durban-Westville (SA) for his research excellence. Recently, Prof. Pillay was awarded the Institutional Directorship of the Wits Hub of the National Medical Devices Innovation Platform (NMDIP), a Medical Research Council initiative (MRC, SA). Prof. Pillay is a member of several esteemed academic and regulatory bodies, some of which include the American Chemical Society (USA), American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (USA), New York Academy of Sciences (USA), Academy of Pharmaceutical Sciences (SA) and the Pharmaceutical Society of South Africa. He is a registered Pharmacist with the South African Pharmacy Council. He is a co-founding Executive Member of the Biomaterials Association of South Africa (BioMatASA) and a former President of this Association. Prof. Pillay served as a full-tenured Associate Professor of Pharmaceutics at the College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Florida A&M University, USA. In addition to obtaining the Fulbright Scholarship to pursue his doctoral studies abroad, Prof. Pillay was also awarded the “NRF Prestigious Fellowship”. He obtained his Ph.D. from Temple University School of Pharmacy, USA, the research of which led to a US patent on a monolithic device for controlled drug delivery that was licensed by a US Pharmaceutical company. He has over 30 other local and international patent applications currently granted or under examination in USA, Europe and Japan. He obtained a Master of Pharmacy degree cum laude from the School of Pharmacy and Pharmacology, University of Durban-Westville.

Research Interest

Polymer and Materials Science, Rate-Modulated Delivery of Bioactive Molecules using Smart Polymers, Nanotechnology for the Design of Targeted Drug Delivery Carriers, Mathematical and Statistical Theories in Drug Delivery,Neurocomputing