CPSA 2011

Science and Technology Coming Together to Make a Difference

October 3 - 6, 2011
Buscks County Sheraton Hotel
Langhorne, PA

Speaker Bio

Ian A. Blair
A.N. Richards Professor and Vice-Chair of Pharmacology
Director, Center for Cancer Pharmacology
Director, Proteomics and Systems Biology Facility
University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Blair received his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry in 1971 from Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, where he worked under the direction of the Nobel Laureate Sir Derek H.R. Barton. He then taught at Makerere University, Uganda, under the auspices of the British Council’s aid scheme to Africa. He subsequently moved to Australia where he held research fellowships at the Australian National University in Canberra and at Adelaide University. Dr. Blair conducted some of the early ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry studies with Dr. John Bowie during his time at Adelaide University. In 1979, he was appointed to a lectureship and then senior lectureship in the Department of Clinical Pharmacology at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School (now part of Imperial College, London). In 1983 he moved to Vanderbilt University as a Professor of Pharmacology and Chemistry. Dr. Blair established a large Mass Spectrometry Center in the School of Medicine for the analysis of drugs and their metabolites, DNA-adducts, and proteins. In 1996, Dr. Blair was appointed to the Derek H.R. Barton Chair in Pharmacology. He was recruited to the University of Pennsylvania in 1997 as the A.N. Richards Professor of Pharmacology in order to establish a new Center for Cancer Pharmacology. In 2002, Dr. Blair was appointed as the Vice-Chair of the Department of Pharmacology and in 2003 he established a mass spectrometry-based Proteomics and Systems Biology Facility at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Blair is an internationally renowned expert in the use of mass spectrometric methods for the structural elucidation and quantification of endogenous biomolecules, DNA-adducts, protein-adducts, and drugs and their metabolites. He has published over 290-refereed manuscripts most of which have employed the use of mass spectrometry. A paper describing the application of electron capture atmospheric pressure chemical ionization to chiral lipid analysis was awarded the 2005 RCM Beynon Prize. In 2005, Dr. Blair became the seventh mass spectrometrist to be elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2006, he was awarded the presitigous Dean's award for graduate student training at the University of Pennsylvania and was elected as a Fellow of the Amarican Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists for his distinguished contribution to the pharmaceutical sciences. He will recive the EasternAward for Outstanding Achievements in Mass Spectrometry at a symposium in his honor in November 2011. Dr. Blair is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Chemical Research in Toxicology, Journal of Mass Spectrometry, and Current Drug Metabolism, and he regularly serves on NIH study sections. Most recently he became a charter member of the Drug Discovery and Molecular Pharmacology (DMP) Study Section.

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