September 17, 2019 | Sheila Foran - School of Pharmacy

Sameera Sansare Awarded Prestigious ISPE Scholarship

This graduate student combines intellect, inquisitiveness and sincerity in her research efforts -- and it's paying off!

Graduate Student Sameera Sansare and Bodhi Chaudhuri, Associate Professor of Pharmaceutics in the School of Pharmacy. (Sheila Foran/UConn Photo)

Sameera Sansare, a doctoral student working in the lab of Associate Professor of Pharmaceutics Bodhi Chaudhuri in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, is the recipient of a 2019 International Society of Pharmaceutical Engineers (ISPE) Joel Goldenberg Memorial Scholarship. The scholarship, which includes a financial stipend of $1600 applied to coursework, is named after the past president of the Boston Area Chapter of the ISPE and is awarded to applicants pursuing careers in STEM fields that support the development and operation of pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical enterprise.

Sansare is studying the process used in drying wet granules that can then be utilized to make tablets or capsules. Her work includes both experimentation and computer simulations of the drying process that help in the timely analysis of data.

In addition to the ISPE Scholarship, Sansare was a UConn Technology Incubation Program Fellow in the summer of 2018 where she conducted label-free imaging of a leukemic cell line using Quantitative Phase Imaging and Raman Spectroscopy. She subsequently received the 2019 Tony B. Academic Travel Award that enabled her to present her Fellowship work at the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS) annual conference in February of this year.

Chaudhuri says, “As a graduate student, Sameera has impressed me with her intellect, inquisitiveness, sincerity and desire to work hard and solve the challenges on hand. Her research areas are exceptionally multidisciplinary and diverse, often including experiments and development of multi-scale numerical models of which she had no background from her undergraduate training. It is her diligence and intelligence that helped her to learn quickly and successfully pursue two very challenging projects funded by the pharmaceutical industry and the FDA.”

Sansare is the first student from Chaudhuri’s group to garner the prestigious ISPE Goldenberg scholarship and he says that he hopes that her achievement will motivate other pharmaceutical sciences students to apply for the award.

A native of India, Sansare completed her Master’s degree in Pharmacy at the University of Mumbai in 2016 and began her UConn studies that same year. She intends to pursue a research career within the pharmaceuticals industry.