Know Your Faculty: Prof. Shital Mahindra Maru, Dean, School of Pharmacy and Health Sciences
By CTW Team
Prof. Shital Mahindra Maru is the new Dean of School of Pharmacy and Health Sciences (SPHS). She brings a wealth of knowledge and experience in the field of pharmaceutics research development using innovative technologies for drug delivery.
Her plan for the SPHS is to give students a more experiential training and introduce more programs for pharmacy, biochemistry, epidemiology and biostatistics including B.Sc. Nursing. Additionally, she says her school plans to introduce medicine, dentistry and other health related courses.
“USIU- Africa has great systems, faculty members and state of the art infrastructure that support students and faculty in terms of research and development.”
Prof. Maru has over 20 years experiences in academic teaching, coaching and mentoring, curriculum development and research in Higher Education Institutes (HEI). Her work includes pediatric formulation and cosmetic formulations development using Quality by Design (QbD) and Process Analytical Technology (PAT) concepts, developing Pharmaceutical Quality Assurance (QA) systems and Pharmaceutical Quality Management Systems (QMS), Pharmaceutical Risk management systems, WHO cGMP and GxP (GLP/GDP, GSP, ICH guidelines and regulation, implementing of ISO 9001, ISO 17025 in pharmaceutical manufacturing unit, pharmaceutical regulatory affairs among others.
She is a consultant with the Pharmacy and Poison’s Board of Kenya as a technical advisor in the expert committee for Pharmacy Education and professional registration. She holds a PhD in Pharmaceutics under the Commonwealth Commission Scholarship at Institute of Pharmaceutical Innovation (IPI) now Centre for Pharmaceutical Engineering at The University of Bradford, UK and University of Nairobi, a mPharm in Pharmaceutics from Rajiv Gandhi University, India, MBA from University of Liverpool, UK and a Bachelor of Pharmacy degree from Karnataka University, India.
Before joining USIU-Africa, she was the acting Dean, School of Pharmacy and Chairperson of the Department of Pharmaceutics and Pharmacy Practice, School of Pharmacy at the College of Health Sciences at the University of Nairobi.