Dr Harparkash Kaur
Assistant Professor
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
Keppel street
London
United Kingdom
Dr Harparkash Kaur gained both her BSc with honours and PhD in chemistry from Kings College, University of London.
PhD thesis: Free Radical Chemistry: Pericyclic Rearrangements and some new spin traps.
Elected chartered chemist, fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 1999 (CChem FRSC) and designated a chartered scientist (CSci) in 2005.
Harparkash joined LSHTM in 2001 as staff on the Gates Malaria Partnership and is a founder member of the artemisinin combination therapy consortium. She is the director of the LSHTM Bioanalytical facility and was the lead investigator of the drug quality project(www.actconsortium.org/drugquality).
Affiliations
Centres
Teaching
- Chair of the CID exam board
- Academic organiser of the Masters Module "Control and Epidemiology of Malaria".
- Supervision of MSc projects and practical teaching of chromatographic techniques on Antimicrobial Chemotherapy Study Module.
- Teaching on both of the above mentioned Study Modules.
- Supervisor to PhD students (currently have two commonwealth scholarship students, one from Zambia and the other from Uganda).
Research
Harparkash set up the bio analytical laboratory at LSHTM. As an analyst she devised high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) based methods applicable to varying fields of research such as determining the levels of free radicals in disease state and levels of endogenous antioxidants. Her present research has involved developing / validating HPLC and simple chemical methods to test the quality as well as levels of drugs in patient samples and measuring the levels of insecticids on treated nets and indoor residual spraying that are used as the major mode of intervention in the fight against malaria. The field friendly methods that she has devised for the detection of artemisnin derivatives and for the detection of insecticides have separate granted patents held by the LSHTM. The focus of her work is to determine the quality of drugs, levels of antimalarial drugs on filter paper adsorbed blood samples and amounts of insecticides on bed nets from a number of trials ongoing/planned in Sub-Saharan Africa. Her recent work has expanded to determining the quality of antibiotics, antihypertensive and antiretroviral medicines purchased in various states within Ghana and Nigeria.