Nicholas Peppas

Dr. Nicholas Peppas is the Fletcher Pratt Chaired Professor of Chemical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Pharmacy at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a world leader in biomaterials, controlled drug delivery, and bionanotechnology. He received a Dipl. Eng. from NTU Athens (1971) and an Sc. D. from MIT (1973). Dr. Peppas has published more than 1,025 refereed publications, 350 proceedings, and 320 abstracts, and is the inventor of 35 US and international patents. He is the co-author or co-editor of 31 books and volumes, including the classic, three-volume Hydrogels in Medicine and Pharmacy (CRC Press, 1987), a standard reference in the field of biomaterials with more than 3,000 citations, the monograph Pulsatile Drug Delivery, (WSGS, Stuttgart, 1993), two books on Biopolymers (Springer, 1994), the monograph Physicochemical and Cellular Foundations of Biomaterials Science (Academic Press, 2004), the book Intelligent Therapeutics: Biomimetic Systems and Nanotechnology in Drug Delivery (Elsevier, 2004) and his new monograph Nanotechnology in Therapeutics (Horizon Press, 2007). His pioneering contributions have received more than 28,000 citations making him one of the most cited chemical or biological scientists in the world and one of the three most-cited Biomedical Engineers. Of particular note is his lifetime effort to rationalize the design and development of biomaterials, drug delivery systems, and medical devices. This has led to the development of the mathematical and physicochemical foundations of these fields including several theories and equations, widely used now in Biomedical Engineering. These include the Peppas equation (for the analysis of the abnormal and highly non-Fickian release and delivery of drugs, peptides, and proteins from controlled release devices), the Peppas-Merrill equation (for the analysis of protein transport through biomedical membranes), the Brannon-Peppas theory (the first theory to analyze the behavior of intelligent, ionic gels in multicomponent biological fluids), the Huang-Peppas interpenetration theory of tethered structures across biological tissues, and the Peppas-Ritger correlation which has more than 1,000 citations in the last 15 years. His modeling, biomaterials, cellular, and drug delivery research has been funded continuously since 1980 by NIH and since 1978 by NSF.