Dr Steven Ferguson is Assistant Professor in the School of Chemical and Bioprocess Engineering at UCD. Following his PhD in UCD, he spent four years working in the United States, firstly as a postdoctoral researcher in MIT and then in drug development at Biogen, also in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In these roles he worked to develop new technologies to manufacture and formulate pharmaceuticals, and in Biogen he also worked on the development of new drugs for neurological and immunological conditions. Since returning to academia he has developed a multidisciplinary research lab. His group has significant industrial collaborations with the pharmaceutical industry, most notably with Pfizer and Merck.
Dr Ferguson’s current research brings together automation, flow chemistry, process simulation and separation science. Within I-Form, his group devises novel reaction and separation systems that are translated to low-cost miniaturised printable production equipment. This is intended to provide platforms to transition the production of drugs to ultra-low cost miniaturised and printable continuous manufacturing facilities.
His group is multidisciplinary and vertically integrated, allowing fundamental insights of reaction and separation system behaviour to be translated into novel processes with new dynamics through process simulation and prototyping. Equipment to apply processes are fabricated in I-Form via additive manufacturing for investigation of commercial potential for novel processes and products. His group currently works across multiple industrial product areas including chemicals, pharmaceuticals, biomedical nanotechnology, biopharmaceuticals, and Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products (ATMPs).
Expertise
Additive Manufacturing (3D Printing), Materials Processing, Process Modeling, Process Monitoring and Control, Product Design, Real-time Data Analytics, Separation Science