Prof. Sarah Hudson, University of Limerick is Co-Principal Investigator and co-theme lead of SSPC’s Materials theme has been awarded SSPC Mentor of the Year 2021, an award kindly sponsored by Eli Lilly.

This award recognises Sarah who has excelled at mentoring others in achieving their career objectives through intellectual support and who serves as an exemplary role model.

Since 2011 Sarah has successfully mentored 2 MSc students, 10 PhD students and 33 fourth year projects students to completion. From her 12 postgraduate students that have graduated, 5 are currently postdoctoral researchers in academic institutions in Ireland (NIBRT and University of Limerick), the UK (Imperial) and Canada (University of Toronto) and 7 are employed in the biomedical and pharmaceutical industry in Ireland and Europe.

She has employed 11 postdoctoral researchers on research projects to date in the department, 7 are still with her, 1 is a chief technical officer in UL, another a postdoctoral researcher in Dublin City University and the remaining 2 are employed in Regeneron and Pfizer in Ireland. She currently manages a team of 23 researchers (PhD students and postdoctoral researchers), is a line manager of a Bernal instrumentation scientist for the Bernal Biolabs and 2 lab facilities in the Bernal Institute at the University of Limerick.

Sarah leads the LongActNow is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action (MSCA) which is a consortium of international academic and industrial centres at: University of Limerick (UL), SSPC , Trinity College Dublin (TCD), TU Dortmund University (TUD) & The Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson. The project, awarded €1.29 million, is a unique European Industrial Doctorate (EID) initiative that aims to address the current, future and global need for the development of additional long acting (LA) drug formulations that achieve extended-release dosage forms that are stable, predictable and which can be applied across multiple and complex Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (API) groups.

Prof. Hudson was central in securing a major partnership with five major BioPharma companies Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Janssen, BMS and MSD. A project that is exploring the possibility and feasibility of reusing these resins, making the production of antibody medicines, faster, cheaper and more sustainable.

Sarah pictured with some of her group based at the Bernal Institute, University of Limerick