Leslie Benet

Dr. Leslie Z. Benet is a Professor of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, and Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and is an internationally recognized authority on drug development.

He is former Chair of the Department at UCSF (1978-1998), and currently lectures at UCSF on drug development and the operation of the FDA.

Dr. Benet has founded four start-up pharmaceutical companies and holds twelve US patents on pharmaceutical compounds. He has received eight honorary doctorates. His research interests include pharmacokinetics, biopharmaceutics, drug delivery and pharmacodynamics, which has produced more than 540 publications and seven books.

Dr. Benet is listed by Thompson Reuters as one of most highly cited pharmacologists worldwide in both the 2001 and 2014 compilations, with his published peer-reviewed papers cited more than 22,000 times. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Research, the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS), the American College of Clinical Pharmacology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is past chair of the International Pharmaceutical Federation, and is a member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Benet served as a member of the FDA Generic Drugs Advisory Committee and the FDA Science Board, as Chair of the CBER subcommittee of the FDA Science Board that delivered its review of science at the FDA in December 2007 and an outside member of the FDA CDER Director and Office of Generic Drugs Deputy Director search committees.

Dr. Benet served on the IOM Forum on Drug Discovery, Development and Translation, the Biodefense Standing Committee of the Department of Defense and on the Boards of Directors of the American Foundation for Pharmaceutical Education, Impax Laboratories, and Institute for OneWorld Health. He is a Scientific Advisory Board Member and/or Consultant for more than 30 pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.