Olivia Merkel

Olivia Merkel has been a Professor of Drug Delivery in the Department of Pharmacy at LMU Munich in Germany since 2015. From 2011 until 2017 she was an Assistant Professor of Pharmaceutics and an Associate Faculty Member of Oncology at Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA, where she was also a Scientific Member of the Molecular Therapeutics Program and Faculty in the Cancer Biology Graduate Program at Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit, MI. She became a Registered Pharmacist in 2005. In 2006, she received a MS in Pharmaceutics from Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, and a PhD in Pharmaceutics from Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany, in 2009. She received several awards, including the Princess-Therese of Bavaria Award, an ERC Starting Grant, the Galenus Foundation Technology Award, the Young Investigator Award from the College of Pharmacy at Wayne State, the Young Pharmaceutical Investigator Award granted by the European Federation for Pharmaceutical Science, an invitation to the Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting, the Carl-Wilhelm-Scheele-Award by the German Pharmaceutical Society (DPhG) and the award for the best PhD thesis at Philipps-Universität Marburg. Prof. Merkel is the author of over 70 peer-reviewed articles, 13 book chapters and the editor of two books. She served as NIH reviewer from 2014-2015, is a standing international member of the Swiss National Science Foundation review board, Editorial Board member for the Journal of Controlled Release, the European Journal of Pharmaceutics and Biopharmaceutics and Molecular Pharmaceutics, and an honorary member of the Académie des Alpilles. Since 2020, she has been the President of the Controlled Release Society German Local Chapter. From Oct 2015 until Nov 2017, Prof. Merkel headed research labs both in Detroit and Munich. Currently her research centers around targeted siRNA delivery in cancer, inflammatory diseases and viral infections with a focus on pulmonary administration and is funded by the European Research Council, several foundations, and AbbVie