Congratulations to Dr Luis Padrela on winning Laboratory Staff Member of the Year at the Irish Laboratory Awards. Luis, a lecturer in Bioprocess Engineering at Chemical Science Dept. and a Investigator in SSPC and the Bernal Institute, University of Limerick won the award for his work in Biopharmaceutical and Pharmaceutical Particle Engineering, Nanotechnologies and Continuous Manufacturing. He has developed industrial expertise in Quality by Design, scale-up methods and particle engineering technologies for small and large molecule APIs with particular emphasis to spray drying of monoclonal antibodies. He has worked within the highest standards of quality in the pharma industry (GLP, GMP).

Luis, was successfully funded as an Assistant Coordinator/Project Leader in 2016 on an US-Ireland R&D Partnership, which was funded by NSF and Science Foundation Ireland, and aims to develop continuous manufacturing methods of nanoparticles for the global pharmaceutical industry. In 2017, Dr. Padrela was funded as the Entrepreneurial Lead in a highly prestigious NSF/SFI I-Corps Entrepreneurial programme, where he and his team performed customer discovery with more 110 potential customers and more than 60 pharmaceutical companies (US, Ireland and UK) on a novel pharmaceutical nanotechnology recently developed by Dr. Padrela.

In 2018, Dr. Padrela was awarded approx. half a Million euros by Enterprise Ireland to build his team of researchers and further develop/scale-up his nanotechnology with the objective to commercialize his nanotechnology and spin-out a company in 2 years’ time. In addition to this, Dr. Padrela has been supporting and collaborating with several PhD and Master students in his Institution as well as supporting undergraduate students (Industrial Biochemistry and Chemical Engineering) to succeed in acquiring funding for Postgraduate grant applications.

Over the last 24 months, Dr. Padrela (1) has published 5 papers in high-impact scientific journals, (2) has currently 4 papers under review, (3) has provided 9 oral and 6 poster presentations in international conferences, (4) has been an invited speaker in 1 major international pharmaceutical conference and (5) has been an invited speaker in an industrial Masterclass and a Seminar at the National University of Galway.