Dr. Vinod P. Shah
President, SPDS-US
Patrick Ballmer
Board Member, SPDS-US and Vice President, Sotax, USA
Dr. Arvind Bansal
Dean, NIPER, India
Pankajbhai Patel
Chairman, Zydus Life Sciences Ltd., India
Dr. Tina Morris
CEO, AAPS
Dr. David Sperry
Sr. Research Advisor, Eli Lilly
Talia Flanagan
Head of Product Design and Performance, UCB, Belgium
Dr. John Middleton
Vice President of Polymer Development, Tolmar
Dr. Deanna Mudie
Principal Scientist, Lonza
Sanjay Patel
Principal Scientist, Merck
Dr. Xujin Lu
Research Fellow, BMS
Dr. James Polli
Professor, University of Maryland
Dr. Dianne Burgess
Board of Trustees and Distinguished Professor of Pharmaceutics, University of Connecticut
Dr. Padma Devrajan
Professor, Institute of Chemical Technology, India
Dr. Tessa Carducci
Associate Principal Scientist, Merck
Dr. Andre Hermans
Director, Merck
Dr. Navnit Shah
SVP and Scientific Advisor, Amneal Pharmaceuticals
Dr. Tycho Heimbach
Director, Merck
Dr. Vivek Purohit
Sr Director Clinical Pharmacology, Pfizer
Dr. Mei Ou
Sr. Biopharmaceutics Reviewer, FDA
Dr. Ramaswamy Lakshmanan
General Secretary, SPDS-India
Dr. Prasad Panzade
Head Analytical Operations and Laboratory Platforms, Protagene
Ajay Pydah
Lead Software and Data Management, SOTAX Group
Dr. Steve Stamatis
Sr. Consultant Engineer, Eli Lily
Dr. Anna Schwendeman,
William I. Higuchi Collegiate Professor, University of Michigan
Zachery Custer
Sr. Scientist, Merck























































Elizabeth Bielski, M.S., Ph.D. is a Senior Pharmacologist working at Division of Therapeutic Performance-I (DTP-I), Office of Research and Standards (ORS), Office of Generic Drugs (OGD), Center of Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) at the FDA since October 2022. Prior to her role as a Senior Pharmacologist, she served as a Pharmacologist (October 2020-October 2022) and as a Chemist (January 2020 t-October 2020) within DTP-I. Her areas of expertise involve orally inhaled and nasal drug products (OINDPs) and drug-device combination products (DDCPs). She is actively involved in developing general and product-specific guidances, addressing controlled correspondences, pre-ANDA meeting requests, citizen petitions, internal consults, and collaborating on current research projects to promote generic drug development of OINDPs and DDCPs. Prior to joining the FDA, she served as an ORISE Fellow at FDA within DTP from August 2018-December 2019. Elizabeth completed her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Wayne State University (Detroit, MI, USA) in July 2018 encompassing work also conducted at Department of Chemistry at the University of São Paulo (São Paulo, Brazil) and Department of Pharmaceutics at Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, VA, USA) related to novel inhaled drug delivery strategies for treatment of lung cancer and lung metastases. Prior to receiving her doctorate, she received her Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Physics Honors with University Honors in 2011, and her Master of Science in Biomedical Engineering in 2012 from Wayne State University.
James Mullin is a Senior Principal Scientist at Simulations Plus, Inc. and has a graduate degree in Chemical Engineering. In his role at Simulations Plus, he contributes to modeling and simulation development and consulting activities across multiple programs including GastroPlus, MembranePlus, and DDDPlus. Most recently, James is participating in an FDA grant project to extend the capability of Gastroplus to predict local tissue concentrations by enhancing the model structure. Additionally, he has developed models to predict partitioning in pulmonary tissues and simulate inhalation of vapors for purposes of toxicological modeling and assessments. James has 19 years’ experience in PBPK modeling, computational fluid dynamics, and mathematical modeling.
Dr. Ross Walenga joined the FDA in 2015 as an Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) Fellow. He is currently a Chemical Engineer at the Division of Quantitative Methods and Modeling at the Office of Research and Standards. He began his career at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), where he earned a Bachelor Science in Aerospace Engineering. He later earned his Ph.D. in Engineering (mechanical track) from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2014, where he also spent seven months as a postdoctoral fellow prior to joining the FDA. His research interests include computational fluid dynamics modeling of orally inhaled, nasal, ophthalmic, and dermal drug products to answer questions pertaining to bioequivalence.
Nilay Patel is a Director of Pre-Formulation & Analytical R&D for the Specialty & complex generics product division at Amneal Pharmaceuticals. He holds a Master’s degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences from Stevens Institute of Technology. Nilay joined Amneal in 2010 as a scientist in the Analytical R&D department and has since progressed through a series of leadership positions within the company. Throughout his tenure at Amneal, Nilay has gained extensive experience working with a wide range of dosage forms, including oral, semisolid, ophthalmic, otic, implants, transdermal, nasal, and inhalation formulations. He has played a pivotal role in suggesting in-vitro alternatives to clinical testing for complex generic products. Currently, he is actively involved in supporting 505(b)(2) programs, focusing on establishing in-vitro models for proprietary gastro-retentive oral dosage forms using multiple approaches.
Dr. Vaka is a Director of Formulation R & D, specialty product division at Amneal Pharmaceuticals. He obtained his Ph.D in Pharmaceutics & Drug Delivery from the University of Mississippi. After graduating, he worked at Kashiv Pharmaceuticals LLC., for about 8 years in R & D, focusing on 505(b)(2) programs. He developed GRANDE® (advanced gastric retention system) and KRONOTEC® (advanced osmotic oral drug delivery system) proprietary technology platforms for controlled drug delivery of challenging compounds that significantly improve efficacy, tolerability and compliance. He has authored 25+ research articles in peer-reviewed international journals, 2 book chapters and is an inventor on over 15 patents.