Congratulations to Sagun Poudel for passing her Ph.D. candidacy exam. Sagun works on ocular drug delivery systems.

Hadi Sudarjat successfully passed the Ph.D. defense. Hadi will start his assistant professor position at Universitas Singaperbangka Karawang, in Indonesia. Congratulations, Dr. Sudarjat.

Qingguo Xu, Ph.D. was named as one of VCU's inaugural class of National/International Recognition Award (NIRA) scholars.

Drs. Xu and Halquist received a 2-year FDA contract for "In Vitro and In Vivo Assessment of Buprenorphine Extended Release Injections for Generic Product Equivalence."

Qingguo Xu, Ph.D. was selected to receive the 2023 VCU School of Pharmacy Excellence in Research Award.

Congratulations to Dr. Rudra Pangeni for being promoted to research assistant professor in VCU School of Pharmacy's Department of Pharmaceutics.

Dr. Xu received a VCU internal commercialization fund for the development of a new PPARα agonist ocular drug delivery system.

Congratulations to Emma, Jinhua and Min on their research paper, "Six-month effective treatment of corneal graft rejection," being published on Science Advances.

Drs. Xu and Jian-xing Ma at Wake Forest University received an NIH/NEI R01 "Sustained release of fenofibrate for the treatment of diabetic retinopathy" ($2.7 million over 5 years).

Tuo Meng successfully passed the Ph.D. defense. Emma will join Merck as a Senior Scientist. Congratulations, Dr. Meng.

Congratulations to Hadi Sudarjat for winning the 2022 Joseph P. Schwartz Award from the VCU School of Pharmacy.

Congratulations to Tuo Meng for winning three School of Pharmacy graduate student awards: 2021 Rector & Rorrer Dean’s Award, 2021 William Barr Award, 2021 John Wood Award.

Congratulations to Emma on her bioanalytical research paper "LC-MS/MS method for simultaneous quantification of dexamethasone and tobramycin in rabbit ocular biofluids" being published in the Journal of Chromatography B.

Dr. Xu and Dr. Youngman Oh were awarded an collaborative VCU VETAR grant studying a novel targeted therapy for AMD.

Congratulations to Dr. Guihong Chai for being promoted to research assistant professor.

Congratulations to Dr. Chai on his recent two pulmonary drug delivery research papers in the Am J Resp Cell Mol Bio and Nanomedicine: NBM.

Congratulations to Dr. Xuan on her review paper in Drug Discovery Today.

Dr. Qingguo Xu was selected to receive the 2020 VCU School of Pharmacy Emerging Faculty Scholar Award.

Congratulations to Dr. Jin Yang on her paper "Sunitinib-malate microparticle inhibiting corneal neovascularization" published in the Journal of Controlled Release.

We welcome Arya Bazargani joining our lab as a Ph.D. student in pharmaceutical engineering.

Congratulations to Dr. Guihong Chai on his paper on a new liposomal aerosol published in Nanomedicine: NBM. 

Congratulations to Tuo (Emma) Meng for passing her Ph.D. candidacy oral exam via Zoom. Thanks to the committee.

Congratulations to Tuo Meng, the second-year Ph.D. student in the lab, for winning the 2020 CRS-Ocular Delivery Focus Group Trainee Award.

Congratulations to Vineet Kulkarni for his successful M.S. thesis defense via Zoom. He will join the University of Texas at Austin to pursue his Ph.D.

Guihong Chai, Ph.D., received the prestigious Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (CFF) postdoctoral fellowship, which will provide two years of support for his work on a novel antibiotic aerosol formulation to treat cystic fibrosis-associated lung infections. Look for collaborations with Michael Hindle, Ph.D., at VCU School of Pharmacy's Department of Pharmaceutics; Bruce Rubin, M.D., at VCU School of Medicine's Department of Pediatrics; and Tony Zhou, Ph.D., at Purdue.

We welcome three new postdoc fellows who recently joined our lab: Lihua Lou, Ph.D., Wenjing Xuan, Ph.D., and Aji Alex Moothedathu Raynold, Ph.D. We look forward to rewarding collaborations with these rising stars.

Big congratulations to Tuo (Emma) Meng for winning both the Thakker Award and Schwartz Award, and to John Kwon for winning the Best Poster Award (Pharm.D.) at the VCU School of Pharmacy Research and Career Day. 

The first stage $1.6M for 2 years of our multi-PI NIH/NIDA UG3 grant (total 5 years) was funded to develop novel treatments for opioid use disorder. Congratulations to all our co-PIs and collaborators (Charles O'Keeffe, Gerry Moeller, Matthew Halquist, Xiuling Lu).

Dr. Xu received the Association of Ocular Pharmacology and Therapeutics (AOPT) Young Investigator Travel Award, and he will give an oral presentation at the 14th Scientific Meeting of AOPT in New Orleans March 7-10, 2019.

Dr. Qingguo Xu will serve as the vice chair for the Controlled Release Society (CRS) Ocular Delivery Focus Group. CRS is the home for experts dedicated to delivery science, including delivery scientists, engineers, clinicians and technical professionals.

We welcome Hadi Sudarjat to join our lab as a Ph.D. student in the pharmaceutical sciences program, and Hadi was awardee of the prestigious Fulbright Scholar funded by the American Indonesian Exchange Foundation.

Qingguo Xu, Ph.D., has been named one of the four Blick Scholars for 2019-23. It is made possible by the George and Lavinia Blick Research Fund, an endowment designated for supporting medical research conducted on VCU's MCV Campus.

John Kwon, a P2 Pharm.D. student, joined our lab as a VCU SoP Summer Research Fellow. John’s research is to develop new method for treating glaucoma. Congratulations and welcome!

Russell Simmers, a rising junior undergraduate in the VCU Honors College and a undergraduate researcher in Xu's Nanotherapeutics Research lab since 2018, was among 6-12 students accepted to the VCU guaranteed admissions program for the VCU School of Medicine.

Dr. Xu is selected as the 2019 CRS Ocular Delivery Focus Group Young Investigator at the CRS annual meeting. The 2019 Controlled Release Society Annual Meeting & Exposition will be held from July 21-24, in Valencia, Spain.

Our invited keynote review paper "Therapeutic implications of nanomedicine for ocular drug delivery" to Drug Discovery Today (IF: 6.85) was published. Congratulations to Tuo (Emma), Vineet, Russell and Vikram.

Tuo (Emma) Meng, the first-year Ph.D. student in pharmaceutics, won the biennial Lowenthal Award for Graduate Research. This award is given every other year to an outstanding first year or second year VCU School of Pharmacy Ph.D. student, who will be conducting doctoral research in genetically-based neurological disorders. The awardee will receive a stipend supplement of $10,000 over a two-year period. Congratulations to Emma! We are grateful for Dr. Hilda Meth's very generous support! 

Fangfang and Emma’s paper "Fenofibrate-Loaded Biodegradable Nanoparticles for the Treatment of Experimental Diabetic Retinopathy and Neovascular Age-Related Macular Degeneration" was accepted by Molecular Pharmaceutics. This is the first collaborated research publication between Xu lab at VCU and Dr. Jian-xing Ma's lab at OUHSC.

We welcome Dr. Guihong Chai, to join us as a postdoc fellow. Dr. Chai received his Ph.D. in pharmaceutical sciences from Zhejiang University and was a postdoc fellow at Purdue University School of Pharmacy before joining our lab.

We welcome Erica Karolina Sjöholm, Pharm.D., to join our lab as a visiting Ph.D. student. Erica got a prestigious research grant from Åbo Akademi University, Finland, to carry out a 6-month collaborative research.

We welcome Tuo (Emma) Meng to join our lab as a Ph.D. student in the pharmaceutical sciences program. Emma was named as the Dean's First Year Graduate Student Scholar.

We welcome Vineet Kulkarni to our lab as our first master's student.

Dr. Xu won the Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award from Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU). VCU last received a Powe award in 2012.

We welcome our visiting Ph.D. student Yang Zhao from Central South University, Department of Ophthalmology. Yang is a CSC Scholar and she will carry out ocular research in our lab for one and half years.

Dr. Xu presents at the 2018 Society for Biomaterials annual meeting at Atlanta.

We welcome our first postdoc fellow, Dr. Sooyoung Kim. Dr. Kim got her Ph.D. in neurology from Korea University, and she was trained at both NIH/NEI and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Dr. Xu receives a five-year R01 grant as PI from NIH/NEI to develop a new method to treat corneal transplantation rejection.

Dr. Xu is selected to join the 2019 AAPS PharmSci 360 Scientific Programming Committee.

Dr. Xu was invited to serve on the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences Editorial Advisory Board (EAB) for a three-year term January 1, 2019 through December 31, 2021.

Dr. Xu receives a three-year FDA grant as co-PI.

Dr. Xu was nominated from VCU to apply for both the Pew Scholar and Searle Scholar. Dr. Xu was also nominated as a VCU Blick Scholar candidate.

We welcome Jian Chen, Ph.D., as a postdoc fellow. Dr. Chen received his Ph.D. in pharmaceutical engineering from Central South University, China.

We welcome Jinhua Zheng, M.D., to join our lab as a postdoc fellow. Dr. Zheng got her M.D. with specialty training in ophthalmology from Guizhou Medical University, China.

Tuo (Emma) Meng was accepted to attend the NIH-funded Training in Neurotherapeutics Discovery and Development for Academic Scientists course March 25-28, 2019 at Rockville, MD. Congratulations!

Dr. Sooyoung Kim was selected as the VCU School of Pharmacy 2018 Research Day Postdoc Runner Up to recognize her outstanding performance at poster presentation. Congratulations!

Lisa’s paper "Controlled release of corticosteroid with biodegradable nanoparticles for treating experimental autoimmune uveitis" was accepted by the Journal of Controlled Release.

Bing and Yating’s paper “Controlled release of dexamethasone sodium phosphate with biodegradable nanoparticles for preventing experimental corneal neovascularization” was accepted by Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology, and Medicine.