Hiyam Hamaed is awarded the Governor General's Gold Medal

Although she enjoys all the sciences, Hiyam Hamaed chose to specialize in chemistry because it has so many applications to everyday life.

"I love chemistry because it goes beyond numbers—you can do it by hand, you can touch it, you can feel it," says the doctoral graduate, who volunteered for years performing a chemistry magic show for local schoolchildren. "I love to show everybody that chemistry is fun."

Dr. Hamaed received the Governor General's Gold Medal as the top graduate student in her cohort at Convocation ceremonies on Oct. 17, 2010. She received her B.Sc. with distinction in chemistry from the University of Windsor in 2005. She began graduate studies at the Master’s level in September 2005 and transferred to the Ph.D. program in 2006, completing her doctorate in June with a grade point average of 12.4 over her graduate career.

Her graduate supervisor, Robert Schurko, describes her as passionate about the science."She loves the work. That sort of attitude carries through in what she does," he says.

He points to her idea to use nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to distinguish between polymorphic forms of pharmaceuticals."She pushed us to think outside of the box," Dr. Schurko says. "Four people are now working on a project she started."

Read more about this story on the UWindsor Daily News website

Process could help drug companies with simpler quality assurance, student finds

[Excerpt from the University of Windsor Daily News - to see the full article, click here]

Pharmaceutical companies may find it faster and easier to assure the quality of their drugs, thanks to the findings of a PhD student in chemistry.~
Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy—technology normally associated with medical diagnostics—is a simpler method than the time-consuming techniques pharmaceutical companies currently use to make sure drugs such as painkillers or allergy medications remain effective through the manufacturing process, said Hiyam Hamaed.

When drugs are made, they're created in liquid solution and then transformed into a solid state for manufacturing, packaging, and shipping. Some substances crystallize in varying forms; each of these polymorphs has different properties which can influence the way people metabolize drugs, as well as their shelf life, packing, and handling. To see what final form the polymorphs have taken, pharmaceutical companies will try to make single crystals out of their drugs for molecular X-ray analysis, which can be painstakingly slow or sometimes impossible, Hamaed said.

"The problem is obtaining a single crystal," said Hamaed, who defended her thesis last week. "This can be very difficult. Crystals can be very hard to make."

Hamaed said NMR can be used to analyze the molecular structure of solid pharmaceuticals, eliminating the need to form crystals. Her work focused on the hydrochloride salts, often the most stable forms of many solid pharmaceuticals. She found that NMR is a better method for determining the identity and purity of these pharmaceuticals when standard methods, such as X-ray diffraction, fail.
"These are very fast experiments," said chemistry professor Rob Schurko, Hamaed’s academic advisor. "We can take a snapshot and quickly confirm whether a polymorph has formed. Each NMR signature acts as a fingerprint for each type of pharmaceutical or polymorph."

[Excerpt from the University of Windsor Daily News - to see the full article, click here]

To read more about Dr. Schurko's research, visit his homepage at:

http://www.uwindsor.ca/schurko