Personal statement

Dr Sara Cordeiro is a pharmacist by training, having graduated in 2010 with an Integrated Master’s Degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of Porto (Portugal). In 2017, she completed a PhD in Drug Research and Development at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain), under the supervision of Prof María José Alonso, and later worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast (UK) between 2017 and 2021, under the supervision of Prof Ryan Donnelly. In these 15 years in research, Sara developed a strong background in drug delivery and controlled release, focusing on applications of nanomedicine for vaccine delivery and microneedle-based approaches for transdermal delivery.

In January 2021, Sara was appointed as a Senior Lecturer in Pharmaceutical Sciences at De Montfort University (Leicester, UK) and has taken up various teaching, research and citizenship responsibilities within the Leicester School of Pharmacy. She also set up her independent research group at DMU – 

Since May 2025, she has taken up the position of Senior Lecturer and MPharm Programme Director at SIPBS and is currently establishing her research group at Strathclyde – 3Ds Lab (Drug Delivery and Diagnostics) – focusing on improving and facilitating patients' lives by developing drug and vaccine delivery systems that are easy to manufacture and scale-up, highly efficient and administered through non-invasive routes.

Sara has supervised several undergraduate and postgraduate research project students, including three PhD students who are currently ongoing in their degree path. Sara has been an internal and external examiner for MSc by Research, MPhil and PhD in multiple occasions, in the UK and abroad. She is actively involved with scientific societies in the field, namely the Controlled Release Society (CRS) and the Academy of Pharmaceutical Sciences (APS). At CRS, Sara was previously the Chair of the Young Scientist Committee and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Newsletter and the eMedia Lead for the Women in Science group. At APS, she is a Board Member and a member of the Programme Committee for the APS PharmSci conference in 2025. Sara has also peer-reviewed for more than ten leading journals in the field and is currently an Editorial Board member for Drug Delivery and Translational Research (also Review Editor) and AAPS Open and an Advisory Board member for RSC Pharmaceutics.