RUTGERS

Matthew Sills, PhD
Dr. Matthew Sills is currently Professor of Professional Practice in the Professional Science Master’s program at Rutgers University. In this position, he teaches in the Drug Discovery & Development concentration, advises students in the Life Science concentrations (including Personal Care Science) and develops curricula for programs in the Life Sciences. Dr. Sills has 27 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry, having worked at Ciba-Geigy/Novartis, Pharmacopeia, AD-4 Pharma and Merck. During his career, Dr. Sills gained experience in the areas of lead discovery, lead optimization, and preclinical development having worked on projects in the inflammation, cardiovascular disease, oncology and neuroscience therapeutic areas.

Francois Berthiaume, PhD
Francois Berthiaume is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Dr. Berthiaume received a BS degree in Chemical Engineering from Laval University, Quebec City, Canada, and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the The Pennsylvania State University. After post doctoral studies at the Center for Engineering in Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital / Harvard Medical School, he was promoted to faculty rank in the same institution. In 2009, he was recruited to the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Rutgers University. His research has been funded by numerous awards from private, state, and federal agencies, including the Whitaker Foundation, the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, the New Jersey Commission on Spinal Cord Research, the Department of Defense, and the National Institutes of Health. He has published over 150 peer-reviewed papers.
Research interests:
Dr. Berthiaume's research interests are in the general areas of tissue engineering and metabolic engineering, with a particular focus on technologies to promote wound healing.  In the area of skin wound healing, Dr. Berthiaume has extensive experience in animal models of burn injury as well as pressure sores, and in the development of various modalities to improve the wound healing process of these injuries. Recently, we have developed, using fusion protein technology, recombinant proteins that exhibit increased stability and efficacy in the chronic wound environment. 
Sonia Trehan, PhD 
Sonia Trehan has a broad industrial and academic research experience in design, development and evaluation of novel drug delivery systems like microemulsions, polymer and lipid-based drug-delivery systems for topical, oral, pulmonary and parenteral delivery. The key research interests are developing efficient conventional and targeted drug delivery systems and evaluating their clinical efficacy with relevant end points and quantification methods. Dr. Trehan is also proficient in developing dry powder inhalation formulations and other targeted drug delivery systems using different formulation techniques. Currently, at Center for Dermal Research, she contributes her skills in managing all collaborative industrial research projects involving topical, cosmetic and transdermal drug delivery. 

Sanjeeva Murthy, PhD
Dr. Sanjeeva Murthy is a Materials Scientist and has been a research faculty at the New Jersey Center for Biomaterials, Rutgers University since 2007.  Before coming to Rutgers, he was an Associate Professor in Physics for more than 4 years at the University of Vermont.  Prior to that, he worked at Honeywell for 21 years, which he left in 2002 while he was a Senior Principal Scientist there.  He did his postdoctoral work at MIT, the New York State Department of Health and Carnegie Mellon University.  He obtained his Ph.D. in Materials Science from the University of Connecticut.  He came to the U.S. after obtaining a Master’s degree from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India.  
Research interests:
Dr. Murthy’s expertise is in the physical properties of materials, polymers processing, and fabrication of devices.  He develops structure-property relationships using a variety of techniques including rheology, and related techniques for tailoring polymers for biomedical applications.
William Welsh, PhD
Dr. William J. (Bill) Welsh holds the Norman H. Edelman Endowed Professorship in Bioinformatics in the Department of Pharmacology at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (RWJMS), Rutgers University in Piscataway NJ. Concurrently, he serves as Associate Director of the Division of Cheminformatics of the Biomedical Informatics Shared Resource at the Rutgers-Cancer Institute of New Jersey (R-CINJ). He also serves as a faculty investigator at Princeton University in the Department of Chemistry. 
Dr. Welsh received in B.S. degree magna cum laude in Chemistry from St. Joseph’s University (Philadelphia, PA). He earned a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physical Chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA). He then conducted postdoctoral studies in computational physical chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, OH) and at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).