Francheska is a master’s student currently in the field of Pharmaceutical processes. Besides working on her research, she enjoys baking and traveling. Francheska loves her lab and says they are like family to her. A great connection is the key to a great work environment!
Francheska M. Reyes was born in Mayaguez Puerto Rico and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Industrial Pharmacy at the University of Puerto Rico Medical Sciences Campus. Francheska obtained a bachelor’s degree at the University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez Campus in Chemical Engineering. She also worked at AbbVie Biotechnology LTD for almost three years. In this past semester, she was fortunate to participate in a six-month Co-Op Internship at a pharmaceutical company known as Boehringer Ingelheim, where she had the opportunity to work in a technical transfer and manufacturing site start-up of a new product. Her internship focused on cleaning and process validation.
Francheska has been working at the Crystallization Design Institute (CDI) under the supervision of Dr. Torsten Stelzer, PI of the PREM – IRT 2 project, on polymorphic phase transformations during continuous formulation processes. At the CDI, Francheska has strongly developed not only her research skills but also her professional skills. “The work environment is very professional and the facilities at the Molecular Sciences Research Center (MSRC) are very technological and up to date. As lab members, we are not only researcher students, we are family; always helping each other to succeed in our projects and professional careers.” – Francheska M. Reyes.
Her research is titled Control of polymorphic phase transformations in polymer-based extrusion processes, which aims to decouple the critical process parameters associated with the Hot Melt Extrusion (HME) technique (temperature, pressure, shear stress, composition and residence time) to address their individual effect on transformation kinetics, helping to gain fundamental understanding of the processing needs of a crystalline solid dispersion containing active pharmaceutical ingredients prone to polymorphism.
Francheska’s goals after finishing this investigation are to publish the results for the scientific community and to help broaden the application of HME in the pharmaceutical industry as a continuous manufacturing strategy for drug products containing active pharmaceutical ingredients prone to polymorphism, which represents a challenge during formulation and manufacturing of such complex products.
