Saad Shakir
Director
Drug Safety Research Unit
UK
Biography
Saad Shakir qualified in Medicine in 1976 and worked in hospital medicine for eleven years before moving to general practice. He has been working in pharmacovigilance & pharmacoepidemiology for more than a decade, initially at the Medicines Control Agency (MCA) in the UK then in the international pharmaceutical industry.He was appointed as the Director of the Drug Safety Research Unit (DSRU) in Southampton in 1999. The DSRU is an academic Unit associated with the University of Portsmouth. At the DSRU he leads a research team with an active programme for monitoring and studying the safety of medicines. Saad Shakir is a Fellow of the Royal Colleges of Physicians in Glasgow, Edinburgh and London, a Fellow of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine, a Fellow of the International Society of Pharmacoepidemiology and a Member of the Royal College of General Practitioners in the UK. He continues to practice clinical medicine part-time. He has worked and advised on many drug safety issues including product withdrawals and major safety hazards. He is an author of many publications in scientific journals on pharmacovigilance and pharmacoepidemiology and is a member of the editorial board of the journals of Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety. Saad Shakir has led, co-ordinated and participated in many postgraduate educational and training programmes. He supervises postgraduate students for higher degrees and has been involved with a number of international initiatives to promote and develop pharmacovigilance and pharmacoepidemiology.
Research Interest
Pharmacovigilance risk management and risk minimisation and its effectiveness