John was a founding member of The Aerosol Society, acting as Vice-Chairman from 1992-96 and President from 1996-98, and is a co-founder of the highly successful Drug Delivery to the Lungs series of conferences. He is now a private consultant specialising in strategic approaches to developing respiratory devices, drugs and digital health. In addition, he is a Chairman of Acu-flow, a Director of Cardiff Scintigraphics, and sits on 4 Scientific Advisory Boards. At different stages in his career across the UK Atomic Energy Authority, GSK, 3M, AZ and Philips, he has worked on environmental and occupational effects of radioactive aerosols, lung deposition and been associated with the launch of 11 major products to treat respiratory diseases. He also sits on the UN Committee that makes recommendations on the medical uses of propellants covered by the Montreal Protocol. In April 2018, John received the Charles Thiel award for outstanding research and discovery in respiratory drug delivery from Virginia Commonwealth University.
Ian Colbeck and John Pritchard
The inaugural meeting of the Aerosol Society was held on 15 July 1986 at the Royal Free Hospital. It was formed to recognise the need to provide a forum to encourage translation of science across the different disciplines. This theme continues today, and still provokes great interest, as evidenced by the success of the Aerosol CDT.
Since its formation the Society has hosted an International Aerosol Conference, 4 European Aerosol Conferences, Annual Conferences, 36 Drug Delivery (DDL) Conferences as well as numerous one day meetings. This talk will give a brief overview of the formation of the Aerosol Society, the significance of DDL, and an analysis of how the topics and institutions at the Annual Conferences have changed over the years.
For example, the very first one day meeting was on aerosols in veterinary science; a topic which rarely appears nowadays even at European Aerosol Conferences. The first annual conference was attended by over 100 participants and consisted of 2 plenaries and 37 oral presentations. These were split into sessions on (i) sampling, generation and analysis; (ii) industrial and nuclear aerosols; (iii) fundamental and theoretical; (iv) medical/biological aspects; (v) agricultural aspects; (vi) atmospheric. Speaker affiliations included the Health and Safety Executive (Cricklewood), Warren Spring Laboratory, Central Electricity Generating Board, AEE Winfrith.
