Globalization of Pharmaceutics Education Network (GPEN), Inc.

GPEN, Inc. was founded in 1996 by the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at The University of Kansas (Lawrence, KS) in cooperation with several educational institutions in Europe and Asia. The rationale for creating GPEN, Inc. was based on the fact that pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, which hire the graduates of these educational institutions, had become highly globalized. Therefore, the founders of GPEN, Inc. felt that graduate students and postdoctoral fellows being trained at their institutions needed increased exposure to science and culture at an international level.

GPEN, Inc. was created for the sole purpose of fostering and facilitating international scientific exchange in the following areas of the pharmaceutical sciences:

• physical pharmacy
• bioanalysis
• animal and human biopharmaceutics, pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics and pharmacogenomics
• cellular and molecular biopharmaceutics
• drug delivery
• drug targeting
• pharmaceutical biotechnology
• pharmaceutical engineering
• materials science
• computational and modeling approaches in drug formulation and delivery.

Educational institutions holding membership in GPEN, Inc. have demonstrated research excellence in one or more of these areas of the pharmaceutical sciences. In addition, these institutions have a proven commitment to the training of predoctoral students and postdoctoral fellows for careers in universities, government institutions and pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.
GPEN, Inc. specifically sponsors biannual meetings designed to foster and facilitate international scientific exchange in the pharmaceutical sciences:

GPEN, Inc. works closely with host institutions in the organization of international meetings of the faculty, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from the participating educational institutions. These meetings include two days of scientific presentations by graduate students and postdoctoral fellows and one day of short courses taught by the participating faculty. Selected industrial representatives are invited as observers. To date, GPEN, Inc. has sponsored the following meetings at the indicated universities:

• GPEN1996, The University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS
• GPEN1998, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
• GPEN2000, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
• GPEN2002, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
• GPEN2004, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan
• GPEN2006, The University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS

The next GPEN Meeting (GPEN2008) will be held at Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven, Belgium on September 10-12, 2008 and co-sponsored by Katholieke Universiteit, Utrecht University, and Leuven University.