Peter R. Byron Distinguished Professorship

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In 2016, on the occasion of his retirement, Dr. Peter Byron endowed the Peter R. Byron Distinguished Professorship in Pharmaceutics.   Dr. Byron is a man of many faces—a pharmacist, an immunologist, an engineer and physicist of sorts, a British turned American citizen. He served as VCU’s pharmaceutics department chair from 1992 to 2016, during which time he built the world’s leading academic aerosol research team.

Byron has devoted much of his career to creating new and better drug inhalation devices. In fact, Byron holds a number of patents on vastly improved aerosol inhalers that are widely used today. “The problem with traditional inhalers,” Byron says, “is that only 10 to 30 percent of a medication dose is making it to a patient’s lungs.” But through his latest major collaboration with the pharmaceutical industry, a multi-million dollar grant from Chrysalis Technologies. Many of Byron’s peers consider him the world’s leading voice for respiratory drug delivery systems.

As chairman of the United States Pharmacopoeia Aerosols Expert Committee, Byron was active in regulatory policies in the U.S., Europe and other parts of the world. His international Respiratory Drug Delivery Conference, sponsored since 1988 by the VCU Department of Pharmaceutics, is widely considered the field’s premiere symposium. International standing aside, Byron says what he is most proud of are his students. “My former students have proven by virtue of their own accomplishments that they can innovate. That’s the real reason we faculty are here after all, to make our students independent, to help them build enough confidence to fly on their own.”

Dr. Michael Hindle is the Peter R. Byron Distinguished Professor.  Dr. Hindle joined the VCU School of Pharmacy in 1997 and has enjoyed exceptional success and recognition in the fields of novel aerosol drug delivery devices, in vitro particle size analysis and aerosol characterization and inhaler designs.  Dr. HIndle heads an interdisciplinary group that works in collaboration the VCU School of engineering to combine computational fluid dynamics and design engineering to produce novel pharmaceutical aerosol drug delivery systems.