Pradeep Kumar

Pradeep Kumar (Ph.D.) is a Personal Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Wits’ Department of Pharmacy and Pharmacology, Senior Researcher at the Wits Advanced Drug Delivery Platform (WADDP) Research Unit, and Chair of the School of Therapeutic Sciences' Teaching and Learning Committee. Prof. Kumar has over 15 years of experience in academic teaching with molecular pharmaceutics as the core subject and research focused on biomaterial design, tissue engineering, and nanomedicine. His PhD thesis (with 7 granted patents) was focused on the design and development of Polymer-Engineered Neural Devices for potential application in reducing neurological deficits after spinal cord injuries and was awarded the Wits Faculty of Health Sciences’ Most Prestigious PhD Degree Award. In addition, he is interested in the in silico mathematical analysis and programming for performance interpretation of drug-eluting assemblies and polymer architectures. He holds a Y1 rating from the NRF.

Prof. Kumar is an Expert Group member of the OECD Global Science Forum’s Research Precariat Project; Business Case Laboratory Expert and Faculty at LISEAD, ESMT, Berlin; ExCo member of the South African Academy of Science (SAYAS); Steering Committee member of the ASSAf Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (SAGE); Research Portfolio Leader in the Gauteng DoH Spinal Cord Injury Work Group; and has co-led the Scientific Excellence Working Group in the GYA. As an Expert Group Member, he proudly contributed to the IAP Statement on Regenerative Medicine published in 2021.

Prof. Kumar is a recipient of several prestigious awards/accolades including G20/S20 Observer 2025, ACS Symposium Chair (2025), 04 WoS Highly Cited Papers (2024), Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) Membership (2024), Gauteng Accelerator Programme (GAP) Competition winner (2023), ORCID Researcher Advisory Council (2022), New Voices in Global Health (2022), VC's Innovation Award (2021), IAP/WHO/M8 Young Physician Leader (2021), Wits Health Consortium’s Great Leap Forward Entrepreneurial Academic Award (2021), ALBA-FKNE-YIBRO diversity grant (2020), Global Young Academy Membership (2020), INGSA-Africa Science Advice diploma (2020), Wits’ Friedel Sellschop Research Award (2019), South African Young Academy of Science Membership (2018), ASRT (Egypt) Young African Researcher Award 2018 (Category: Health and Pharmaceutical Sciences), Mail & Guardian’s Top 200 Young South Africans 2018 (Category: Science and Technology), Golden Key International Honours Society Membership (2018), Claude Leon Foundation Merit Award (2018), African-German Network of Excellence in Science (AGNES) Junior Researcher Grant (2018) funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the German Ministry of Education and Research, Society of Pharmaceutical Education and Research’s Young Scientist Award at PST 2018, Wits Innovators Forum’s First-time (2013), Prolific (2014) and International (2016) Inventor Awards, International Society of Developmental Neuroscience Scholarship (2012), and Elsevier’s NanoToday PhD Award (2011). Three of his publications have won the best pharmaceutics paper award at PSSA conference (2013, 2014, and 2015) and eight of his presentations have won best oral/poster presentation including three young researcher awards. He was a recipient of the prestigious Prime Minister’s Scholarship (Ministry of Defense, Govt. of India) and an AICTE (India) fellowship during his MPharm.

Prof. Kumar’s research findings have been published in over 340 outputs with 13500 citations (H-index: 57), 4 editorials, 3 edited books, and 51 book chapters. He continues to feature in Stanford University’s Top 2% scientists list (20'20, '21, '22, '23, '24). To date he has supervised/co-supervised 23 PhD students to graduation/completion and currently busy with 10 doctoral projects. Prof. Kumar is an inventor on 36 granted patents (08 USA, 06 Europe, 07 China, 02 Japan, 02 India, 01 Australia, 09 RSA, and 01 ARIPO) from 09 patent families. His research has been funded by USAID, NRF, SAMRC, Technology Innovation Agency, Claude Leon Foundation, von Humboldt Foundation, Wits’ FRC and URC. Prof. Kumar is on expert reviewer panel of various funding agencies such as UKRI Talent Peer Review College, EU Research Council (ERC), National Research Foundation (Singapore), Claude Leon Foundation, EDCTP, Agence Nationale de la Recherche (France), Euregio Science Fund, and the NRF (South Africa). He is on the reviewer panel of over 110 scientific journals with over 1000 reviews completed. He is an Assoc Editor of the journal 3 BioTech, PLOS One, and for the Special Sections 'Clinical Diabetes' and 'Biomaterials' in Frontiers (over 280 manuscripts edited). Prof. Kumar, a registered pharmacist in India and South Africa, is a member of several prestigious societies such as CRS, ISN, FENS, ESN, SAYAS, RSSAf, SASCA, TERMIS, ISID, Eur Peptide Soc, Int Chem Biol Soc and the Soc for the Advancement of Sci in Africa.