Rita Vanbever-Zaman, Ph.D.
Research Associate of the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research
Rita Vanbever received a Pharmacist Degree in 1992 and a Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences in 1997, both from the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) in Brussels, Belgium. From 1997 to 1998, she was a Fulbright post-doctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, USA. Since 1998, she leads research on pulmonary drug delivery at the department of Pharmaceutical Technology of UCL in Brussels. In 2001, she was given tenure by the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research. She has co-authored more than 25 original articles and several reviews and is co-inventor in 8 patent applications. She lectures on Pharmaceutical Technology at UCL.
Rita Vanbever did her PhD thesis on transdermal drug delivery by skin electroporation at the Department of Pharmaceutical Technology of UCL under the direction of Professor Véronique Préat. She was awarded by the Royal Belgian Academy of Medicine in 1998 and the Belgian Society of Pharmaceutical Sciences in 1999, for her Ph.D. thesis. Professor Robert Langer of MIT was her postdoctoral mentor. Her postdoctoral research involved the formulation of insulin particles for inhalation having sustained release properties. She was awarded the 2001 TR100 Award by MIT's Technology Review for this work. The TR100 Award identifies the 100 innovators under 35 of the year.
The current research of Rita Vanbever focuses on optimizing the pulmonary delivery of therapeutic peptides and proteins by understanding the mechanisms involved in their pulmonary fate. She also explores the potential of pulmonary vaccines, their tolerability and the mechanisms involved in pulmonary immunization.