Nial J. Wheate

Nial J. Wheate is an Australian pharmaceutical chemist at the University of Sydney.

Career
After completing high school at Copland College in Canberra, Australia, he was appointed an officer in the Royal Australian Navy and attended the Australian Defence Force Academy, where he studied for a Bachelor of Science degree double majoring in chemistry, in 1997  with Class I honours for his degree. After a short appointment as a Visiting Military Scholar, Nial undertook a PhD under the supervision of Associate Professor J. Grant Collins within the School of Physical, Environmental and Mathematical Sciences, at University College, University of New South Wales, with a thesis: Platinum Anticancer Drugs in 2001.

Over the next three years Wheate was posted to the School of Air Navigation, RAAF Base East Sale, the Air Coordination and Policy Agency, the Joint Health Support Agency and the Sea Power Centre – Australia. He left the Navy in 2005, receiving the Australian Defence Medal in 2007. He was then appointed a Senior Fellow in the School of Biomedical and Health Sciences at the University of Western Sydney before appointment as a lecturer in medicinal chemistry in the Strathclyde Institute of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. Currently he is a senior lecturer within the Faculty of Pharmacy at University of Sydney.

Research interests
Wheate's research interests are in the field of metal-based drugs for use in chemotherapy. His research group's work includes drug design and synthesis, encapsulation of drugs in macrocyles, attachment of drugs to nanoparticles, drug solid state stability and polymorphism (materials science), drug mechanisms of action, improving drug solubility through the formation of cocrystals, drug metabolism, drug preformulation and formulation, and drug-excipient interactions in various dosage forms. Recent highlighted work has included the development of magnetically directed drug delivery for platinum drugs.

He is best known for his work on multinuclear platinum-based drugs and the drug delivery applications of cucurbiturils.

He is a member of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the Society of Biological Inorganic Chemistry and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Acdemy.

He was previously an associate editor of the Australian Journal of Chemistry.

Other contributions
Nial has also published in a variety of other areas including military justice, naval history, weapons of mass destruction and he has written a novel titled Whikatak Island.