Professor Michael J. Pikal: Scientist, family man, educator, colleague and friend
✍ Scribed by Steven Nail
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2009
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 112 KB
- Volume
- 98
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-3549
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Mike Pikal is one of the very few pharmaceutical scientists in the world equally comfortable, and equally successful, in both industrial and academic settings. He is held in high regard by both groups because his research career has been a shining example of the application of scientific rigor to problems associated with development and manufacture of pharmaceutical dosage forms. In the busyness of day-to-day life in the pharmaceutical industry, most scientists deal with these problems by, frankly, ''throwing a patch on them and hoping they'll go away.'' Mike has steadfastly-and at times perhaps stubbornlyresisted this approach. In doing so, he has done the pharmaceutical science community a real service by educating us on the importance of understanding what's going on at a fundamental level, even on problems that, on the surface, may appear mundane.
SCIENTIST
Mike is a physical chemist-turned pharmaceutical scientist. After receiving his B.S. degree in chemistry from St. John's University (Minnesota), he earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry at Iowa State University. Following a post-doctoral fellowship in solution thermodynamics at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, he took a position as assistant professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Eli Lilly recruited Mike away from academics in 1972, and he stayed at Lilly for the next 24 years. His first real impact as a pharmaceutical scientist was a natural outgrowth of his training as a physical chemist-measurement of vapor pressure of nitroglycerin and the application of this knowledge to physical stability of nitroglycerin tablets. His work on nitroglycerin stability (J. Pharm. Sci., 65:1278 (1976)) led to his first major recognition by the pharmaceutical world-the Ebert Prize in 1977. His early work in stability assessment of solid oral dosage forms, particularly cephalosporins, led to a better appreciation for the role of the physical state of a drug in