Xiuling Lu, Ph.D., has been named recipient of the 2019 Dean Robert L. McCarthy Faculty Service award from the School of Pharmacy. This award is presented annually to a full-time faculty member who is recognized as providing outstanding service to their department, the school, the university, the profession of pharmacy, and the public at large.
Lu is Associate Professor of Pharmaceutics in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Associate Director of the Kildsig Center for Pharmaceutical Processing Research (CPPR) — an industry/university research center focusing on new technology for pharmaceutical processing while fostering collaborative research projects between industrial and academic scientists.
In letters nominating her for the faculty award, Lu was cited for her role in developing and directing the Student Educational Assistance (SEA) Program, which enables student peers to provide learning assistance to fellow students within their own class year, and for serving as secretary of the Sino-American Pharmaceutical Professional Association in Connecticut (SPPA-CT).
As director of SEA, Lu won the UConn Center of Excellence in Teaching and Learning 2018 Mini Grant Competition for the program’s novel and effective approach in mentoring student teaching and learning. In her role with SPPA-CT, she organized a Joint Scientific Symposium with the UConn School of Pharmacy that proved to be of great benefit to both organizations.
As Associate Director of CPPR, she has been recognized for the role she has played in the recruitment and stewardship of the companies the organization depends on for funding. She was also instrumental in the creation of the CPPR website when the organization moved to UConn.
In addition to her other duties, Lu serves on UConn’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC), as faculty advisor for the UConn student chapter of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (APPS), and as Coordinator for the Pharmaceutics Seminar series within her department. She received the American Association of University Professors-UConn Excellence in Research and Creativity: Early Career Award in 2016. She is a reviewer for more than 40 scientific journals and has been selected to review grants from international organizations such as the Dutch Cancer Society, the Biomedical Innovation Fund of the French National Research Agency, and the Israel Science Foundation.
She is quick to acknowledge the support of her colleagues in the School of Pharmacy, as well as her students. When notified that she had won the faculty service award, Lu said,”It is very heartwarming to receive this award. It is easy to serve the School and the University when I have such supportive administrators and wonderful faculty colleagues, students, and staff at UConn.”
A native of the Heilongjiang Province in China, Lu received her Ph.D. in biochemical engineering from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2005. She joined the University of Kentucky as a postdoctoral scholar in 2006, and two years later, she received a prestigious Benedict Cassen Post-Doctoral Fellowship from the Education and Research Foundation for the Society of Nuclear Medicine to support her work on dual imaging-therapeutic nanovectors.
In 2008, Lu moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and, in 2011, she joined the UConn School of Pharmacy. Her research involves the use of nanoparticle-based formulations to deliver therapeutic and diagnostic agents, primarily applied in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.
