In honour of Professor Ruth Duncan, recipient of the Journal of Drug Targeting's Lifetime Achievement Award for 2017

Abstract

A photograph of Professor Ruth Duncan, recipient of the Journal of Drug Targeting’s Lifetime Achievement Award for 2017 (courtesy of R. Duncan).It is the time of year to honour the recipient of the Journal of Drug Targeting’s Life-time Achievement Award for 2017. The Lifetime Achievement Award is an unsolicited award given annually to honour the sustained outstanding scientific achievements of a researcher working in the broad fields of drug delivery and targeting. This year’s winner as always was selected by a scientific panel comprising members of the Editorial board and representatives from Taylor and Francis, the publishers of Journal of Drug Targeting.

It gives me great personal pleasure to announce that Professor Ruth Duncan is the recipient of this year’s Journal of Drug Targeting’s Lifetime Achievement Award for her life-long, high profile, translational research into polymer-based drug delivery systems – a field she prefers to call ‘polymer therapeutics’. Prof Duncan was formerly a Director of the Centre for Polymer Therapeutics at the Welsh School of Pharmacy, Cardiff University, UK – where I had the pleasure of being her colleague after she played a key role in my recruitment as Professor of Drug Delivery in the same school in 2002. Ruth currently holds the honorary positions of Professor Emerita at Cardiff University, and Visiting Professorships at the University of Greenwich, UK, and Centro de Investigación Príncipe Felipe, Valencia, Spain. As a reflection of her extensive multidisciplinary skills, Ruth has previously held posts of ‘Professor of Cell Biology and Drug Delivery’ at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Keele, UK, and at the School of Pharmacy, University of London (now University College, London). She is a graduate of Liverpool University (BSc in Zoology) and Keele University (PhD awarded in 1979) where she studied cell uptake mechanisms involving pinocytosis/endocytosis and lysosomal trafficking.