Niklas Sandler received his M.Sc. (Pharm.) in 1998 from University of Helsinki, Finland. He got his Ph.D. in pharmaceutical technology from the University of Helsinki 2003 with the thesis entitled "New perspectives for visual characterization of pharmaceutical solids". He was lecturer at the Pharmaceutical Technology Division, Helsinki between 2003-2005 and in 2005-2006 he took up a postdoctoral position with at the University of Otago, New Zealand, focusing on research regarding various solid-state characterization aspects of pharmaceutical materials. He became an adjunct professor in Pharmaceutical Technology at the University of Helsinki in 2007. Between 2006 and 2008 he had a senior researcher position at AstraZeneca Pharmaceutical and Analytical R&D in the UK. Between September 2008 until July 2009 was a temporary professor in Industrial Pharmacy at the University of Helsinki. He has been professor in Pharmaceutics at Åbo Akademi University (ÅAU), Turku, Finland, since August 2009. Sandler's group is part of the BioCity Turku Biomaterials Research (http://biomaterials.utu.fi) and Pharma Network Turku (www.pharmanetwork.fi). He heads the research in pharmaceutical technology which was established in August 2009 as a new field within ÅAU and he has pioneered in research around printable drug-delivery systems. His group has 2 post doctoral researchers and 4 PhD students and hosts various national and international visiting PhD and MSc students.
Research interests
The current focus is on understanding of material behaviour in fabrication of printable drug-delivery systems. Among other projects Prof. Sandler is the coordinator of the pPOD -Printable Pharmaceuticals for Drug Delivery project in the TEKES Functional Materials Programme (2011-2014). Niklas Sandler has a wide range of publications in the areas of new image analysis approaches for pharmaceutical solids and solid state characterization and data analysis e.g. employing multivariate techniques. He has interest in excipient functionality and is a member of the international steering committee for the Handbook of Pharmaceutical Excipients. Current research projects also focus on material behavior in solid dosage forms and image-based process analytical solutions for increased understanding of processability of materials in unit operations and continuos processes.