Biographies of Organizing Committee

Dr. Thomas Blanton - PPXRD Chair
International Centre for Diffraction Data, Newtown Square, PA, U.S.A.

Tom is the Principal Scientist and Database Manager at ICDD. Before joining ICDD he was a Senior Principal Scientist at Eastman Kodak Company where he worked in industrial applications of X-ray diffraction and X-ray fluorescence for 31 years. He was responsible for the operation of the X-ray Spectroscopy Laboratory, utilizing diffractometers for powder, pole figure, nonambient, high-resolution, reflectivity, and two-dimensional XRD. Materials analyzed included inorganics, organics, solid state devices, thin films, corrosion products, ceramics, pharmaceuticals, polymers, and nanomaterials. Tom was also the Technical Leader in the Specialty Materials Development Laboratory. His area of focus was utilization of XRD for microstructure characterization resulting in new materials development for intellectual property and product development. Tom has 145+ publications including 4 book chapters, 46 U.S. Patents and 57 international patents.

Tom has served as a member of the ICDD Board of Directors for the terms 1992-1998 and 2004-2013, serving as Chairman 2008-2012. He has also received the honor of being named an ICDD Distinguished Fellow. Tom has been an instructor at the SUNY Albany and ICDD XRD Clinics for more than 30 years, and has served as a lecturer at the University of Rochester.

Dr. Detlef Beckers
PANalytical, Almelo, The Netherlands
Lead Scientist

Ph.D. in Physics at the Research Center Jülich, Solid State Physics Institute, Germany in 1996.

Dr. Beckers joined PANalytical B.V. in 1996 (Philips Analytical B.V. at that time) in the position of Project Manager XRD (X-ray diffraction). He was responsible for the management of hardware development projects and (pre-) development of new optical XRD modules. He then assumed the position of Market Segment Manager Pharmaceuticals, Food and Life Science where he was responsible for applications and business development, and the co-ordination of the pharmaceutical, food and life science market activities within the company. Today, he serves as Lead Scientist for PANalytical.

Dr. Julien Giovannini
AstraZeneca, Sweden

Bio coming soon

Dr. Arnt Kern
Bruker AXS GmbH, Karlsruhe, Germany

Bio coming soon

Dr. Keisuke Saito
Rigaku, Ettlingen, Germany
 
Dr. Saito earned his Ph.D. in Material Science at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, in 2002. He joined Rigaku in 2011, and has been in charge of product management of X-ray diffractometers, global marketing and now marketing in EMEA. 

Dr. Kenneth Shankland
Reading University, Reading, U.K.
Reader in Pharmaceutics

Dr. Shankland recently left the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, after 15 years there, to take up a post as a Reader in Pharmaceutics at the School of Pharmacy at Reading University.  His main scientific interests lie in the area of structures and transformations in pharmaceutical materials and he has been heavily involved in software development for crystallographic analysis of these and other systems. His work, with Professor Bill David of the STFC Rutherford Lab on the subject of global optimisation strategies for the structure determination of molecular materials from powder diffraction data, led to the publication of several key papers in the field and ultimately to the production of the DASH software package which is now co-developed with CCDC.  His underlying interest in the use of computing methodologies to further this work has seen particular utility in the development of highly parallelised versions of DASH and other closely-related codes that run on distributed computing systems.  He is a keen user of laboratory-based X-ray diffraction equipment and a regular user of diffraction beamlines at central facilities.

Dr. Gregory A. Stephenson
Elanco, Greenfield, IN, U.S.A.
Research Advisor

Dr. Greg Stephenson received his Ph.D. degree in Medicinal Chemistry from Purdue University where he conducted his graduate research under the advisement of Professor Stephen Byrn. In 1994, he joined Eli Lilly and Company's Preformulation Department where he is a Research Advisor responsible for the discovery and characterization of salts and polymorphic forms of potential drug substances.  Much of his work centers around the application of solid state techniques such as Single Crystal and Powder X-ray Diffraction and 13C solid-state NMR spectroscopy, to better understand physical properties of pharmaceuticals. Greg has published over 60 peer-reviewed research articles and patents, serves as Associate Editor for the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and is an elected Fellow for the ICDD.

Dr. Raj Suryanarayanan
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, U.S.A.
Professor and William and Mildred Peters Endowed Chair College of Pharmacy

Dr. Suryanarayanan (Sury) is a Professor of Pharmaceutics in the College of Pharmacy, University of Minnesota.  He also holds the William and Mildred Peters Endowed Chair in Pharmaceutics. He obtained his Bachelor of Pharmacy and Master of Pharmacy degrees from the Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Pharmaceutics from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. His research is focused in the area of solid-state properties of drugs.  His publications in this field deal with phase transitions in solids, implications of in situ phase transitions on product performance, evaluation of concepts of crystallinity and development of new techniques to evaluate crystallinity in solids.  He has developed X-ray diffractometric techniques for the qualitative and quantitative analyses of solid phases, to determine the drug content in intact tablets and to study solid-state reactions.  His research group is currently involved in developing low temperature powder X-ray diffractometric techniques to study frozen and freeze-dried pharmaceutical systems.  He is a consultant to numerous pharmaceutical companies and has served as a member of the USP Expert Committee (excipients test methods). He is a fellow of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists and is the past-chair of the Teachers of Pharmaceutics Section of the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy.

Dr. Hideo Toraya
Rigaku Corporation, Tokyo, Japan

Bio coming soon

Dr. Peter G. Varlashkin
GlaxoSmithKline, Durham, NC, U.S.A.
Physical Properties & Developability

Dr. Peter Varlashkin obtained his Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry from the University of Tennessee (Knoxville).  After a post-doctoral appointment at New York University, he joined GlaxoSmithKline (RTP, NC, U.S.A.) in April 1986.  Except for a two-year stint at Metrics, Inc., a contract pharmaceutical organization, from 2004 to 2006, he has been an employee of GSK working in the analytical and physical properties characterization of active pharmaceutical ingredients and drug products.

Dr. Shawn (Xiaotian) Yin
Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, New Brunswick, NJ, U.S.A.
Principal Scientist
Solid-State Chemistry Group
Analytical Research & Development
Research & Development

Dr. Shawn (Xiaotian) Yin received his Ph. D. in Solid-State Chemistry from the University of Waterloo, Canada. He did his Post Doctoral fellowship at the Department of Materials Sciences and Engineering, Cornell University, U.S.  Currently, Dr. Yin is a Principal Scientist and the group leader of the Crystal Form Chemistry and Characterization group at Bristol-Myers Squibb. His research interests include pharmaceutical polymorphic form studies, pre-formulation work, nanomaterials for drug delivery, physical characterizations of pharmaceutical substances and powder X-ray diffraction applications in pharmaceutical sciences.  

Dr. Yin has (co)-authored 15 scientific publications and eight patents.  He serves as a scientific organization committee member for the Pharmaceutical Powder X-ray Diffraction Symposium.  Dr. Yin is also a frequent invited lecturer at international and domestic scientific conferences and workshops.