Ajit S. Narangworks for the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at ORIC Pharmaceuticals, Inc., in South San Francisco, CA. His primary expertise is in oral drug delivery. He holds over 20 years of pharmaceutical industry experience in drug development. Prior to ORIC, Ajit has also worked for Genentech, Inc.; Bristol-Myers Squibb, Co.; Ranbaxy Research Labs (currently a subsidiary of Daiichi Sankyo, Japan); and Morton Grove Pharmaceuticals (currently, Wockhardt USA). He holds undergraduate Pharmacy degree from the University of Delhi, India and graduate degrees in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the Banaras Hindu University, India, and the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC) in Memphis, TN. He currently serves as the Chair of Biopharmaceutics Technical Committee of the Product Quality Research Institute. His current research interests focus on new drug discovery research. He has been credited with several publications, patents, and books throughout his career; and has contributed to the development of several clinical and marketed drug products.

Ram I. Mahato

is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, NE. He was a professor at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Research Assistant Professor at the University of Utah, Senior Scientist at GeneMedicine, Inc., and as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, Washington University in St. Louis, and Kyoto University, Japan. He received PhD in Drug Delivery from the University of Strathclyde, Great Britain and BS from China Pharmaceutical University, Nanjing. He has published 166 peer reviewed papers, 24 book chapters, holds 3 US patents, and has edited/written nine books and eleven journal issues (Total Google Citations= 13,060 and h-Index =67). He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Neuroimmune Pharmacology, was a Feature Editor of the Pharmaceutical Research (2006-2013). He is a CRS and AAPS Fellow. He is applying sound principles in pharmaceutical sciences in the context of the latest advances in life and material sciences to solve challenging drug delivery problems in therapeutics. His areas of research include delivery and targeting of small molecules, miRNA and genes using novel polymeric and lipid carriers for treating cancer, liver fibrosis and diabetes.