Professor Rafik Karaman is currently a distinguished professor of pharmaceutical sciences, College of Pharmacy, Al-Quds University, Jerusalem, Palestine and adjunct professor at Basilicata University, Italy. He received his Ph.D. MS and bachelor degree in Pharmacy from the Hebrew University. He was an Assistant Professor at the University of Toledo and University of California for 5 years where he worked with Professor T.C. Bruice in the bioorganic chemistry field. Professor Karaman is broadly interested in the design and synthesis of prodrug systems to be used for the delivery of certain drugs that have poor water solubility or/and have low bioavailability as well as synthesis of prodrugs for masking the bitter sensation of commonly used drugs. The prodrug design is executed using ab initio, DFT, semiempirical, molecular mechanics as well as molecular dynamics and conformational dynamics methods. The overarching goal of Karaman’s research activities is to establish a method for obtaining prodrugs that their interconversion rates will be controlled or programmed by the chemical features of the linker (promoiety) attached to their active parent drugs. Professor Karaman has more than 180 peer-reviewed manuscripts and book chapters; 140 of them were published in the recent 9 years. He is currently an editor and an editorial board member of more than 50 international journals in the areas of pharmaceutical sciences.
Specialization areas:
Prodrugs, Prodrugs Design, Drug Discovery, Drug Design, Computational Methods, DFT Calculations, Synthesis of Organic Compounds, Reactions Mechanisms.