Hello everyone!  My name is Ayah and I am from Cairo, the capital of Egypt.  I am a pharmacist and I have joined Waterford Institute of Technology in Ireland as the researcher on Project 4,  to work with Dr Helen Hughes, Dr Laurence Fitzhenry, and Dr Wayne Cummins on the development of bioadhesive ocular drug delivery systems.

I obtained my Bachelor’s degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences and Drug Design from the Faculty of Pharmacy at Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt. Upon graduation, I was top ranked among my class scoring Excellent with honors in both undergraduate courses as well as graduation project. This entitled me to get 2 prestigious job offers based on national competitive selection, one at the National Organization of Drug Control and Research and the other as an academic and teaching staff at university, however my passion for pharmaceutics research and teaching made me select academia.

On joining the department of Pharmaceutics and Industrial pharmacy at Ain shams University, I worked on 2 research projects. In the first one, I worked on spray drying and optimized its use for the microencapsulation and structural preservation of bioactive materials. This project resulted in a first authored publication and led to a second project, in which we worked on the development of a novel 2 in 1 spray congealing encapsulation technique that can be used to encapsulate bioactive materials into nano/micro particles.

After this I was awarded the prestigious Erasmus Mundus (EM) scholarship for international students to study the NANOMED Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s Degree in Nanomedicine for Drug Delivery from which I graduated in 2019 with the first rank.  During my master’s degree, I specialized in Biotech drugs formulation, and got to explore the various fields of drug delivery while rotating between Paris Descartes University in France, Università degli Studi di Pavia in Italy, and the University of Patras in Greece.

To further enhance my experience in biotech drug formulation and delivery, I did a 6-month internship on the use of electrospinning for transmucosal protein vaccine delivery at the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences at King’s College London. Furthermore, I worked at UTCBS in France in collaboration with The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), The National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM), and The University of Paris Descartes on a collaborative project on “Employing Nanofabrication Processes for the Timely and Targeted Injectable Delivery of EPR imaging probes”

Taking my academic career to the next level, I realize my responsibility to develop not only my scientific, problem solving and academic skills, but also  my understanding of the overall drug development  process and what it actually  takes to bridge the gap between academia and industry till fulfilling the unmet clinical need of  patients, and thus I was very  blessed to continue  my PhD in Orbital with its exceptionally large and multidisciplinary consortium that  joins expertise from academia, industry, and even ophthalmologists in clinics  providing the best chance  for career and personal development.