Speaker Profile

BIOGRAPHY

Sam Salek is Professor of Pharmacoepidemiology and Regulatory Science in the School of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences, University of Hertfordshire, UK, where he leads the Public Health & Patient Safety research group. He is also the Director of the Institute of Medicine Development, Cardiff, UK, a visiting professor at the State of Hessen, Germany, and Vice-President of the PharmaTrain Federation.
Professor Salek is the co-founder and the past chair of the Patient Engagement Special Interest Group of the International Society of Quality of Research, co-chairs the European Haematology Association Scientific Working Group for Quality of Life and Symptoms and chairs the EHA SWG ‘Gaucher’s Disease Task Force’. Professor Salek completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Oklahoma in 1978. He later moved to Cardiff, where he studied for his PhD, 1985–1989.
Since completing his PhD, Professor Salek has held a number of academic posts on both sides of the Atlantic. His major research interests include pharmaceutical regulatory science to improve patient access to new medicines; benefit-risk assessment of medicines; development, evaluation and application of instruments to assess patient-reported outcomes (PRO) and health-related quality of life (HRQoL); and pharmacoeconomics/health economics.
Over the past four decades he has received a number of government and industry research grants for projects covering development and clinical applications of patient-reported outcome instruments. Professor Salek has developed a few undergraduate, postgraduate diploma and MSc programmes over the past 40 years which continue to be successful. Of note: he developed and modernised the 2-year part-time Postgraduate Course in Pharmaceutical Medicine (Dip Pharm Med) and was the Course Director of the same for 30 years. He is the founder of the MSc in International Pharmaeconomics & Health Economics in 2007 and was the programme director of the same until 2015.
He is the founder of the Integrated Master of Regulatory Science (an undergraduate programme), which received approval from the University of Hertfordshire Validation Board in April 2017 and commenced in Sept 2018. Professor Salek is a fellow of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine of the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, the European Society of Clinical Pharmacy, a global fellow of the IFAPP in medicines development and a member of the Cardiff Medical Society.
He is a member of five editorial boards and has published 19 books and over 750 journal articles and abstracts. He has developed and validated 12 general and disease-specific patient-reported HRQoL measures, a quality decision-making tool (QoDoS), and a quality outpatient discharge information checklist, whilst also collaborating with the pharmaceutical industry to design PRO/HRQoL protocols for clinical trials. Increasingly, Professor Salek is shifting his emphasis towards the practical applications of PRO/HRQoL measures in clinical decision-making and policy, quality decision-making and patient engagement in research as partners/collaborators.