Meet our Science & Research Committee
Christine Bond (Interim Chair)
Contact SRC
[email protected]
Christine Bond (Interim Chair)
Christine Bond, (BPharm (Hons.) , MEd, PhD, FRPharmS, FFRPS FFPH FRCPE, FRCGP) : Emeritus Professor and past Head of Centre of Academic Primary Care University of Aberdeen.
She is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Pharmacy Practice (IJPP), international Associate Editor of the Canadian Journal of Hospital Pharmacy, interim Chair of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society Science and Research Board, previous member of the Scottish Pharmacy Board and immediate past Chair of the RPS Panel of Fellows; with the Chief Pharmaceutical Officer for England, David Webb, she is the co-chair of the UK Pharmacy Research Advisory Board.
From 1996-2012 she was seconded to Grampian Health Board as Chief Pharmaceutical Officer and part-time Consultant in Pharmaceutical Public Health in which role she was developing new community pharmacy and general practice based pharmacy services.
She has been awarded well over 100 research grants and has over 350 research publications on the contribution of pharmacy, as well as other health care disciplines, to the delivery of health care, and has a particular interest in the pharmacist’s role in the evidence based, safe and cost-effective use of medicines.
She has sat on many national and international funding bodies including the PRUK Scientific Advisory Panel, Chief Scientist Health Services Research Committee, Department of Health commissioned calls, Health Research Board (Ireland).
In 2010 she was awarded the Pharmas Lifetime Achievement Award.
Hend Abdelhakim
Dr Hend Abdelhakim is an academic pharmacist and Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Pharmaceutical Sciences and Healthcare Innovation at UCL’s Global Business School for Health. She originally trained as a community pharmacist and qualified as an Independent Prescriber in 2024, bringing frontline clinical insight into her academic and professional work.
She completed a PhD in Pharmaceutics at UCL School of Pharmacy, where she also worked as a researcher and Associate Lecturer, contributing to teaching and interdisciplinary pharmaceutical sciences research. Her academic expertise includes age-appropriate medicines, taste assessment and taste-masking strategies, fixed-dose combinations, and multi-drug formulations, with a strong focus on medicines acceptability, adherence, and patient experience.
Her move to the Global Business School for Health reflects her interest in the interface between pharmaceutical sciences, healthcare innovation, and implementation, including how medicines are developed, regulated, commercialised, and ultimately used in practice. She works across disciplines to bridge pharmaceutical science, clinical pharmacy, ethics, and health systems research.
Dr Abdelhakim is strongly committed to equality, diversity and inclusion and currently chairs the EDI committee in her department, supporting inclusive research cultures, education, and professional practice. She is also co-founder and director of Gustoceutics™, a consultancy focused on patient-centred dosage-form design and palatability assessment, and is committed to strengthening the role of pharmacists in medicines innovation and real-world care.
Mar Estupiñan Fdez. de Mesa
Andrew Fox
Andy has been a practising pharmacist for over 30 years and has specialised in paediatric pharmacy for the last 25 years. He has been working in medication safety at UHS since 2004 and was recognised as a Consultant pharmacist for Medicines Safety in 2019.
Andy has a specific research interest in paediatric medication safety and completed his PhD in 2017.
He has been awarded research grants by various bodies including the Health Foundation and the Neonatal and Paediatric Pharmacy Group. He has been awarded a UHS Research Leadership Project award and has worked to improve the research capacity and quality of the pharmacy dept.
New research interests include 3d printing and personalised medicine and the use of data to improve medication safety.
Gillian Hawksworth
Gillian Hawksworth MBE, BPharm (Hons.), DSc Hon, PhD, FRPharmS, FFRPS
A visiting Professor University of Huddersfield, she is a Past President of RPSGB and a Past chair of the RPS Panel of Fellows.
She has been an RPS Pharmaceutical Science advisory member since 2010 and a member of the RPS Pharmaceutical Society Science and Research committee since 2020.
She was a member of the MHRA Chemistry, Pharmacy and standards expert advisory group from 2006 till 2021 which included requests to advise CHM.
With a background in community pharmacy, as an academic her research interests include up to 100 publications focusing on Pharmacy practice, with a particular interest in the pharmacist’s role in antibiotics and antimicrobial resistance.
She has been awarded a number of national professional awards including the RPS Gold Charter award in 2010, the UKCPA lifetime achievement award in 2011 and the RPS lifetime achievement award in 2017.
Oisín Kavanagh
Oisín N. Kavanagh is a pharmacist and Senior Lecturer in Pharmaceutics at the School of Pharmacy, Newcastle University and a Fellow of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society.
He received the Gold Medal from the Pharmaceutical Society of Northern Ireland in 2017 and completed his clinical training in his hometown of Derry before moving to the University of Limerick to undertake his PhD.
He was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to the School of Pharmacy, University of Michigan and was subsequently appointed to a Lectureship at Newcastle University in 2021.
He is the Primary Investigator for multiple research streams funded by industry, government, and charitable organisations. This includes EPSRC and Kidney Research UK funded projects investigating nephrotoxicity and a project funded by Action Medical Research/LifeArc focused on engineering new drug formulations for cystinosis, a rare disease.
Barrie Kellam
Barrie Kellam is Professor of Medicinal Chemistry and Head of the School of Pharmacy at the University of Nottingham and Fellow of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society. He currently serves as the Chair of the Pharmacy Schools Council and is a member of the International Pharmaceutical Federation’s Academic Institutional Membership (FIP AIM) Advisory Committee.
Professor Kellam graduated with a BPharm and PhD from the University of Nottingham. He has led major collaborative drug discovery programmes, teaches extensively across undergraduate and postgraduate pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences courses, and plays a prominent national and international leadership role through positions highlighted above.
His research focuses on small molecule synthetic medicinal chemistry, particularly targeting G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). He has established an international reputation in fluorescent ligand synthesis and the development of fluorescence-based technologies to study ligand–receptor interactions in living cells. This work has driven innovations in high-throughput assays for drug discovery and enabled single-cell pharmacological investigations in healthy and diseased tissues.
Patents arising from his research supported the creation of CellAura Technologies Ltd. in 2006, later acquired by HelloBio in 2014.
Jayne Lawrence
After qualifying as a pharmacist, Jayne undertook a PhD at the University of Manchester. She subsequently moved to the Pharmacy Department at King’s College London, eventually becoming first female Professor in the Department. While at King’s College, Jayne also served as Chief Scientist at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, a role she undertook on a half-time secondment.
Jayne subsequently moved to the University of Manchester, where she initially served a six-year stint as Head of Pharmacy and Optometry. She was later appointed as Director of the University of Manchester at Harwell where, amongst other things, she represents the University to the National Facilities on the Harwell campus.
Jayne’s research focuses on the development and characterisation of pharmaceutical nanoformulations. Of note, is the fact that Jayne pioneered the use of neutron scattering techniques to characterise these nanomedicines.
Jayne has a record of developing early-career researchers, having graduated over 60 PhDs students and mentored a similar number of post-doctoral fellows as well as academic colleagues. Jayne has served on numerous national and international level committees, and is currently a member of the UKRI Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Council, France's Institute de aue Langevin’s (ILL) Science Board, and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Academy of Pharmaceutical Sciences.
Jayne was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 2020 (the "COVID Honours") for Services to Pharmaceutical Science.
Olaolu Oloyede
Rachel Palmer
Rachel is a Consultant Pharmacist in genomic medicine for the South West Genomic Medicine Service and is passionate about highlighting the key role of pharmacy professionals in mainstreaming genomic services, to benefit patients.
Rachel has an interest in pharmacogenomics, personalised/precision medicines and has completed an MSc in Genomic Medicine.
Rachel’s enthusiasm for genomics was initiated in her previous role as a Lead Pharmacist for Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products.
In addition to sitting on the RPS Science and Research Committee, she continues to work as an independent prescriber in CAR-T cell services and is a member of the Pan UK Pharmacy Working Group for ATMPs and Membership Engagement Lead for the UK Clinical Pharmacy Association Genomics Committee.
Ka-Wai Wan
Dr Ka-Wai Wan is a pharmacist by training and graduated from The School of Pharmacy (University of London). She was trained as a hospital pharmacist before completing her PhD in nanomedicine at the Welsh School of Pharmacy (Cardiff).
Her research interests lie in the field of nano-based drug delivery systems for targeted therapy and delivery of macromolecules such as nucleotides and proteins, particularly for cancer and antimicrobial applications.
Ka-Wai worked as a research academic for over a decade, and she was a Principal Lecturer in Pharmaceutics and Course Leader for the MSc Industrial Pharmaceutics prior to her transition to the MHRA as a pharmaceutical assessor in 2016.
She is now working as an Expert Quality Assessor at the MHRA, leading on the assessment of nano-based medicinal products, and providing scientific and regulatory advice on innovative medicines, particularly on nanomaterials used for both small and macromolecules delivery. This includes nano-based drug delivery systems using polymers, liposomes and various types of lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) for a wide variety of medical applications, including mRNA/LNP products as vaccines and cancer immunotherapy.