Minneceutics

Greetings Alumni and Friends,

The College of Pharmacy is delighted to welcome R. Kip Guy, PhD, as our new dean. Dr. Guy was most recently the Dean of the College of Pharmacy at the University of Kentucky. Read more about Dean Guy’s background, interests, and accomplishments. Those of you attending the AAPS meeting will have the chance to meet Kip at the University of Minnesota reception. I take this opportunity to thank Amy Pittinger for serving as Interim Dean during a challenging period. Read Amy’s farewell letter. 

The department bid goodbye to Professor Calvin Sun who has moved to Purdue University. During his time at the University of Minnesota, Calvin built an outstanding program in the field of Pharmaceutical Materials Science and Engineering. We wish Calvin continued success in his scholarly endeavors. Read Calvin’s farewell letter.

As you know, there have been many changes in the funding situation at the federal level. The funding uncertainty has necessitated a careful look at the size of our graduate program. You will see more about this in Ron Siegel’s column.

However, at the departmental level, we are making good progress with the establishment of fellowships to support graduate students. This year was special with the award of two new fellowships – the Dr. Kuchi S. Murthy and (the late) Dr. Swatantra Bharathi Murthy Fellowship and the Raj Suryanarayanan Fellowship. We are also making excellent progress in the institution of the Ronald Siegel Fellowship and the William Elmquist Fellowship to honor two of our senior and distinguished faculty. The alumni from Ron’s and Bill’s labs are taking a leadership role in setting up these fellowships. We will be providing more details at the AAPS alumni event.

While helping the graduate students complete their graduate degrees, our staff have also been busy with their own graduate education. Katie James completed her Master’s of Education from U of M Duluth in May 2025. You may also recall that Amanda Hokanson earned her Master’s of Science in Training and Human Resource Development (TRHRD) from the University of Wisconsin-Stout in December 2022. Thus both of our office staff have graduate degrees and we are very proud of their accomplishments.

After forty years as a faculty member at the University, I began my phased retirement in September 2025. Though I continue to maintain my teaching, research, and service activities, I do not plan to take on new students to my research group.

I am looking forward to meeting you in San Antonio. As always, we look forward to news from alumni.

Best wishes,

Sury

Dr. R. Kip Guy is the dean of the University of Minnesota College of Pharmacy and a professor in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry. Dr. Guy obtained his BA in chemistry from Reed College in Portland, OR in 1990. After college, he worked as a process development chemist in the Process Translation Unit at IBM-Almaden in San Jose, CA. In 1996, he received his PhD in Organic Chemistry based on the total synthesis of taxol from the Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in La Jolla, CA. While at Scripps he held an Office of Naval Research Graduate Research Fellowship, George Hewitt Medical Research Fellowship, and ACS Organic Division Fellowship. He also carried out additional training in Physiology at the Woods Hole Research Institute in Woods Hole, MA in 1995. From 1996 to 1998, he was a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow in Cellular Biology, focusing on the relationship between hedgehog signaling and sterol homeostasis with Drs. Brown and Goldstein at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX.

In 1998 he joined UCSF as an assistant professor with joint appointments in Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology. In 2005 he was promoted directly to full professor. In 2002 he founded the Center for Chemical Diversity at UCSF, which provided access to high throughput chemistry to the campus. In 2003 he founded the Bay Area Screening Center, a joint endeavor between UCSF and the Gallo Institute that provided high throughput screening. These were subsequently merged into the Small Molecule Discovery Center, which is still in operation at UCSF. In 2005, he was recruited to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Memphis, TN, to found and chair the new department of Chemical Biology and Therapeutics, where he was the Robert J. Ulrich Chair in Chemical Biology and Therapeutics. He has held adjunct academic positions at UCSF (adjunct professor of pharmaceutical chemistry), the University of Tennessee (adjunct professor of pharmaceutical sciences and pathology), and Vanderbilt University (adjunct professor of biochemistry).

In 2016, he moved to the University of Kentucky as dean of the College of Pharmacy and professor of pharmaceutical sciences. His primary interests are in evidence-based practice, health disparities, pharmacy education, and drug discovery. His research is focused on the discovery and development of novel small molecules for orphan diseases, particularly small-morbidity oncology and protozoal infectious diseases. Most of his group’s work falls into the areas of chemical validation of novel targets, lead discovery and optimization of novel chemical matter for validated disease targets, and the use of non-targeted whole-cell strategies for lead discovery and optimization. He is the author of 202 papers and book chapters and the inventor on 27 issued patents.

Awards and Recognition

Fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (2020) 

ACS Phil Portoghese Award for Medicinal Chemistry (2023)

Expertise

Blood Cancers; Breast Cancer; Brain/Intracranial Cancer; Prostate Cancer; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; Health Disparities; Drug Discovery and Development; Parasitic and Viral Diseases. 

Biography page for R. Kip Guy, PhD

Dear all,

Thank you so much for the wonderful farewell party. It truly means a lot that you took the time to say goodbye to me, Hae chan Kim, Tianxiang Gao, and Pin-Syuan Huang, and to send us off with your kind wishes. 

I have deeply enjoyed my 17 years in this department and am proud to have been part of it. This place has truly felt like family to me. As I mentioned during the farewell party, I could have stayed in China to help build the Sun family alongside my parents and siblings, but pursuing my career in the U.S. has accomplished far more and made my loved ones proud. In the same spirit, while I could have stayed to continue building the Pharmaceutics department with you, I believe that reaching new heights elsewhere will bring even greater honor to my academic family here.

What I have achieved in my academic career so far would not have been possible without the support, encouragement, and hard work of my colleagues, students, and the nearly 100 Sun Lab members I’ve had the honor to work with. For that, I say a heartfelt thank you.

My last day in the department was August 15th. I promise to work hard to make you proud in the next phase of my academic journey. My new email at Purdue is sun1456@purdue.edu. Please feel free to drop me a note anytime. If we are not yet connected on LinkedIn, I would be delighted to receive your invitation.

I wish you all peace, joy, and continued success.

Warm regards,

Calvin

Council of Graduate Students (COGS) Representative for the Pharmaceutics Graduate Program:

Lyle Nyberg

The Council of Graduate Students (COGS) is the Recognized Student Governance Association (RSGA) at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities campus that represents, advocates for, informs, facilitates communications among, and supports Twin Cities graduate students (students who are seeking a research degree: a PhD or a Master's that is associated with a PhD program).

Dr. Ron Siegel received a 2025 Award for Excellence in Academic Unit Service. These awards recognize ongoing institutional service at the local level. They are given in recognition of exceptional service that has strengthened the functioning and climate of the recipient’s unit at the U of M.

Recipients Announcement

Source: College of Pharmacy List of Awardees

Dr. Hongbo Pang has been promoted to associate professor in the Department of Pharmaceutics. His research is focused in the field of peptide-guided drug delivery. Dr. Pang has leveraged various state-of-the-art technologies to discover novel disease-targeting peptides, revolutionize conventional therapies with peptide-navigation technologies, and delineate the underlying cellular transport machinery. Such studies hold the promise to improve the safety and therapeutic efficacy of therapies against a variety of diseases, and advance the current knowledge of our body's responses to diseases and therapies. In addition to publications in high impact journals his work has resulted in three patents and one startup company. These efforts receive support from various funding agencies including NIH, DOD, the State of Minnesota and UMN. Dr. Pang also actively contributes to professional and graduate teaching in the area of Biopharmaceutics, and trains students at doctoral and postdoctoral levels.

Dear UMN Pharmaceutics Community,

As indicated by Department Head Raj Suryanarayanan, this has been a year of financial uncertainty, in large part due to the anticipated shrinkage of NIH funding.  Also, Professor Sury and I are on phased retirement and Professor Calvin Sun has left for Purdue University.  Thus, for now, our roster of faculty who can take new PhD students is reduced in size.  Nevertheless, one of our master's students has matriculated into the PhD program, and we have also successfully recruited two new PhD students and one master's student.

This year has seen the first awards of the Raj Suryanarayanan Fellowship and the Kuchi and Swatantra Bharathi Murthy Fellowship, both of which recognize excellence in Pharmaceutics graduate research and scholarship.  We have also initiated fundraising for the William F. Elmquist Fellowship and Ronald A. Siegel Fellowship, which most likely will be awarded for the first time next year. If you’re interested in supporting our fellowships and making a difference in the education and research of our students, please visit our Support Graduate Students in Pharmaceutics page.

Congratulations to Mitch Kowalke, a student in Prof. Hongbo Pang's lab, for his receipt of an American Federation for Pharmaceutical Education (AFPE) Fellowship, a well-deserved recognition of his outstanding research achievements!

I look forward to meeting with those attending the Minnesota Alumni Reception at AAPS in November. Please keep in touch with us regarding your professional, personal, and family news.

Warm regards,

Ron

Wenjuan Zhang, a 2024 graduate of Dr. William Elmquist’s lab,  started her new job as a Senior Clinical Pharmacologist at AbbVie in June 2025.

2025 Melendy Summer Scholarship

John, a 2nd year PharmD student, joined Dr. Fairbanks’ team in August 2024, coming from 2 years as a Minnesota Neuroscience Development Scholar (MINDS). The Melendy Summer Scholarship allows him to continue his research full-time throughout the summer of 2025. John’s research seeks to further elucidate the mechanism of pharmacological action of the molecule, agmatine, in the treatment of chronic pain and addiction.

Dr. Elmquist maintains a robust collaboration with the Mayo Clinic and his lab group is busy working on novel therapies to treat brain tumors- both primary, such as glioblastoma, and metastatic, for instance from lung and skin cancers, in the brain. The work is funded by the NIH and, recently, the National Brain Tumor Society.  Dr. Elmquist is proud of his group and the work they do to fight these terrible diseases.

Dr. Fairbanks is in her eighth year as Associate Dean for Research (ADR) for the College of Pharmacy and has continued her leadership as Chair of the Faculty Burden Reduction Community for the University of Minnesota. She also serves on the Opioid Advisory Task Force of the University of Minnesota and co-leads the U of M Pain Consortium. Dr. Fairbanks began her 3rd year as an appointed Associate Editor of the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.  In the 2025-2026 academic year, Dr. Fairbanks is serving on the scientific program committee and the local organizing committee for the upcoming May 2026 annual meeting of the American Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET), which will take place in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She also served as chair of an external review panel to evaluate the graduate programs in the College of Pharmacy of Purdue University as well as their Bachelor of Science in Pharmaceutical Sciences Program. Dr. Fairbanks greatly enjoyed visiting with the faculty, postdocs, and students of all departments at the College of Pharmacy at Purdue University.

Invited Speaker

• North American Society for Neuromodulation in Orlando, Florida

Funding

In 2024-2025 Dr. Fairbanks and her team continued to work on the award that she and her colleague, Dr. George Wilcox (Co-Investigator, Department of Neuroscience), received in 2019:  a $4.5 million grant from the Department of Defense Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program for their project titled, “Therapeutic Development of Non-Opioid Strategically Substituted Agmatines for Chronic Pain Management”. They partner with Drs. Gunda Georg and Vadim Gurvich of the Institute of Discovery and Development. 

Research Team

Dr. Fairbanks’s research team is truly interdisciplinary. Her students included Dr. Tongzhen Xie (Graduate Program in Pharmaceutics, now graduated and a postdoctoral associate at Boston University, see below), Ms. Cecilia Barajas (Graduate Program in Experimental and Clinical Pharmacology), Mr. Lukas Caye (Molecular Pharmacology and Therapeutics Graduate Program), Ms. Riddhi Kini (Graduate Program in Pharmaceutics), Mr. John Brent (2nd Year PharmD student and Melendy Summer scholar, and Ms. Joe Ntayagabiri (postbaccalaureate fellow in the MINDS program). Her team also includes Dr. Cristina Peterson, Ms. Oanh Nguyen, and Mr. Kelley Kitto (Dept of Neuroscience), and Mr. Parker Jones.

Dr. Kandimalla and his group are dedicated to groundbreaking research focused on the intricate role of the blood-brain barrier (BBB) in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related cognitive decline. Through robust collaborations, including those with the Mayo Clinic and the University of Minnesota, the lab is unraveling the pathological mechanisms that engender BBB dysfunction in Alzheimer’s patients.

Core Research Projects

• BBB Dysfunction and Metabolic Signaling: The lab's primary focus is identifying how the BBB's role in insulin trafficking and signaling is compromised, a critical link between AD and type-2 diabetes that drives cognitive impairment.

• Deciphering Neurovascular Interactions: Utilizing cutting-edge 'omics' approaches, patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cell-derived in vitro models of the neurovascular unit (NVU), and quantitative systems pharmacology modeling, the team is working to uncover the molecular and cellular disruptions leading to NVU uncoupling and impaired BBB transport.

• Targeted Therapeutics and Drug Delivery: They are pioneering the use of cationic lipid bicelles for highly specific siRNA delivery to BBB endothelial cells. This innovative approach aims to regulate vascular inflammatory pathways implicated in neurodegeneration.

• The Gut-Brain Axis: In collaboration with the Microbiome Program at the Mayo Clinic, the lab is actively investigating the gut-brain axis, exploring how the composition of the gut microbiota influences cerebrovascular dysfunction and neuropathological changes in the AD brain.

Featured Computational Neuroscience Project

The Kandimalla Lab has been awarded a prestigious Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience (CRCNS) program grant for their project, "Deep Learning to Discover Neurovascular Disruptions in Alzheimer's Disease." This project, in partnership with the Mayo Clinic, New York University, and the University of Navarra, Spain, is developing advanced deep-learning techniques to identify and ultimately resolve pathological changes within the neurovascular unit that drive cognitive decline in AD. This grant, established by the NIH, NSF, and other international agencies, underscores the lab's commitment to interdisciplinary research that integrates neuroscience with data science and artificial intelligence to accelerate discovery.

Invited Talk

• Plenary speaker, “The Gut-Brain Link to Dementia”, Sri Lanka College of Internal Medicine Conference 2024 (SIMCON2024), Colombo, 9th November 2024

Invited Speaker

• Basic Genomics Analysis Workshop, Alzheimer’s Association International Conference 2025, Toronto, 25th July, 2025

Dr. Kirtane completed his first year as a faculty member in the Pharmaceutics department and recruited a senior scientist and four graduate students to his lab group as well as hosted two student summer interns. The Kirtane lab focuses on developing nanotechnologies for delivering RNA therapies at mucosal surfaces. The lab has also begun several collaborations with UMN researchers who share common goals, specifically in the Cancer Center and the School of Dentistry. Ameya had the opportunity to contribute to several papers over the past year. One of these papers was featured in Yahoo News, another in the BBC, and others in various news outlets.

Invited Presentations

• Designing solutions to overcome barriers to gastrointestinal mRNA delivery, GeneGut Seminar Series, Ireland

Dr. Pang was promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure in 2025.

Awards/Fundings

Dr. Pang (as co-Investigator) received two external awards from the Department of Defense and the Prostate Cancer Foundation, and one internal award from the University of Minnesota (ODAT).

Dr. Siegel is now in phased retirement, working at 75% this year and 50% next year. He will continue to serve as DGS, teach graduate courses, and serve on committees.  He is now the proud grandfather of Gavriel Chanan Monasebian-Siegel, born October 2024. He also took a fall in August and broke his upper left femur, which had to be replaced with a cobalt/chrome implant. He is recovering well but walking with the aid of a cane. At his retirement party, he was dubbed the Bionic Professor, as he watched the party in the surgical recovery room via Zoom. Dr. Siegel is deeply grateful to all who arranged the party and to those who attended, and for the testimonials given by fellow faculty, previous students and postdocs, and his doctoral dissertation supervisor (Bob Langer at MIT), and a former colleague from UCSF (Frank Szoka).

Invited presentations 

• Prodrug/Enzyme Intranasal Delivery for Rapid Prevention or Reversal of Seizure Emergency. 19th International Symposium on Recent Advances in Drug Delivery Systems. Salt Lake City, Utah, February 2025

Dr. Sun officially departed the University of Minnesota in August 2025 and relocated to West Lafayette, Indiana where he joined the Department of Industrial and Molecular Pharmaceutics as the Donald and Susan Barrick Professor. On November 3, 2025, Dr. Sun received the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Pharmaceutical Discovery, Development and Manufacturing Forum (PD2M) Technical Innovation Award, which was presented at the Annual Meeting in Boston. Notably, Dr. Sun also ranked 1,467 in the United States and 5,782 in the world as of the 2025 edition of Research.com. The ranking is based on the D-index (Discipline H-index) metric, which only includes papers and citation values for an examined discipline. The ranking includes only leading scientists with a D-index of at least 40 for academic publications made in the area of Materials Science. The full ranking for the United States is available here: US D-Index Rankings and the full world ranking is available here: Global D-Index Rankings. 

Funding

Awarded February 2025
Title: Gut Microbiota and Effect on Immune Suppressants in Transplantation
Funding Agency: University of Texas
Award Amount: $48,678

Title: Development of a floating tablet of pregabalin 330 using Kollidon SR
Funding Agency: BASF SE
Award Amount: $87,000

Dr. Sury’s work in the area of pharmaceutical material science continues. The current (recent) areas of research are: 

1. The role of cosolutes and processing on the phase behavior of mannitol in frozen and freeze-dried systems

2. Using time-temperature-transformation to understand the role of nucleation in drug crystallization from amorphous solid dispersions

3. Monitoring the stability of dispersions during the dissolution process 

The Sury Lab’s work in the area of protein pharmaceutical has focused on: 

1. Identifying the effects of formulation composition on trastuzumab stability

2. Challenges with effective removal of surfactants from monoclonal antibody formulations challenges associated with the characterization of biosimilars

3. How the sucrose concentration influenced the relaxation processes in freeze-dried monoclonal antibody formulations

Dr. Sury presented one of the plenary lectures at the 5th Spring Pharmaceutical Synchrotron X-ray Powder Diffraction Workshop, at Argonne National Laboratory, IL in May 2025. His lecture was entitled: “Polymorphism and the power of synchrotron-XRPD for the study of pharmaceuticals”.

Invited Presentations

• AAPS Nanotechnology and Excipient Community Webinar: “Implications of excipient phase behavior on protein stability”, September, 2025.

• David Grant Symposium, “Phase behavior of mannitol in frozen and freeze-dried systems”, Minneapolis, MN, June 19, 2025.

Funding

Dr. Sury, along with his colleagues Vadim Gurvich (Medicinal Chemistry), Reza Nejadnik (University of Iowa), and Anurag Rathore (Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi) are in the final stages of completing their NIH/FDA-funded project: “Platform for reliable characterization and evaluation of comparability of biosimilar drug products in lyophilized and liquid formulations”.