Dr. Lucila Garcia-Contreras is Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the Oklahoma University Health Sciences Center. She obtained her Ph.D. degree from The University of Georgia, with a Fulbright Scholarship. Following a postdoctoral position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Eshelman School of Pharmacy, she moved up the ranks to Research Associate Professor, where her research focused on the design, formulation and evaluation of drugs and vaccines delivered by the pulmonary route for the treatment and prevention of tuberculosis.

In 2011 Dr Garcia-Contreras joined the faculty of the College of Pharmacy at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center where she has extended her research on the design and evaluation of novel inhalable formulations for to other respiratory infectious diseases and to novel approaches to treat gynecological and lung cancers. Recently, her research has expanded to include the design novel formulations to treat Alzheimer’s disease using the nose to brain approach.

She has published more than 90 peer reviewed articles and book chapters in the pharmaceutical and biomedical literature on the delivery and disposition of drugs and vaccines after pulmonary administration. Dr. Garcia-Contreras is particularly known for her work on pulmonary administration of compounds to laboratory animal models and pharmacokinetics of inhaled drugs, and tuberculosis.