FPM President’s Medal 2025 awarded to Professor Sam Salek
Posted on: Wednesday 2 July 2025
Author: FPM
Professor Sam Salek has been awarded the prestigious FPM President’s Medal at the 2025 FPM Annual Awards Ceremony.
The FPM President’s Medal is the highest honour FPM can bestow and recognises exceptional individuals who have gone above and beyond to deliver fundamental and transformational change to the field of pharmaceutical medicine. Typically, just one medal is awarded each year and Professor Sam Salek succeeds Dr David Jefferys (2024) and Dr Ruth Dixon (2023) in receiving this honour.
The awarding process is a rigorous one and starts with an invitation to all FPM members to submit nominations. The Fellowship and Awards Committee judges each nomination on its individual merit and a final decision is agreed by a vote. The nominated awardee is presented to the Board for final approval.
The winner receives a physical medal and is invited to our Annual Awards Ceremony where a citation is read by their nominator and they receive formal commendation of their achievements amongst their peers.
Citation given by nominator Professor Peter Stonier
Many here know Professor Sam Salek as the face of the international Postgraduate Course in Pharmaceutical Medicine, better known as the Cardiff Dip-Pharm-Med Course, which he led for 35 years, training over 3,000 professionals with many now occupying senior positions in the global pharmaceutical industry and regulatory bodies.
The Cardiff course was a world first, instrumental in initiating the Diploma in Pharmaceutical Medicine by the Royal Colleges of Physicians, UK. Later both Course and Diploma were foundational standard bearers for the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine. For 30 years the Cardiff postgraduate course was the only feeder course for the Diploma examination.
From these foundations of education and training (E&T) in pharmaceutical medicine, growing alongside the evolving research-based pharmaceutical industry, Sam saw the course and diploma mirrored by the national member associations pharmaceutical physicians in Europe. Sam’s academic career embarked on further educational initiatives in pharmaceuticals – MSc and PhD programmes derived from the core syllabus for pharmaceutical medicine. His own interests led to educational initiatives in the then non-core areas of pharmaceutical medicine – health economics, regulatory science and pharmacoepidemiology. Look what they have become today!
These ingredients of full E&T in pharmaceutical medicine with syllabus, curricula and assessments were reinforced by the Innovative Medicines Initiative’s PharmaTrain project to develop an E&T platform for all in medicines development. Sam was major contributor to PharmaTrain, being a board member for the project and Vice-President of the follow-up PharmaTrain Federation. He has similarly contributed directly to the Faculty on its Education Committee and other activities concerned with E&T, academic diplomas, vocational specialty training and continuing professional development.
Today Sam’s pioneering record over 40 years of contribution and influence in the development and sustainability of full E&T in pharmaceutical medicine is unequalled, whether at home now as professor of pharmacoepidemiology and regulatory science at University of Hertfordshire or leading and contributing to programmes in Europe, Africa and other regions around the world.
Fellows, Members, Guests – in recognition of his many contributions to pharmaceutical medicine education, and support of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine I am delighted to present Professor Sam Salek as a recipient of the President’s Medal.
About Professor Sam Salek
Sam Salek is Professor of Pharmacoepidemiology and Regulatory Science in the School of Life and Medical Sciences, University of Hertfordshire, UK where he leads the Public Health & Patient Safety research group. He is also the Director of the Institute for Medicine Development, South Bucks, UK, Vice-President of PharmaTrain Federation and a visiting Professor at the State of Hessen, Germany. He is the founder and past chair of the Patient Engagement Special Interest Group of the International Society of Quality of Research, Past Chair and current co-chair of the European Hematology Association (EHA) Scientific Working Group for Quality of Life and Symptoms and chair of the EHA ‘Gaucher’s Disease Task Force’.
Sam’s association with FPM started in 1985 in his capacity as the Director of the Cardiff Postgraduate Course in Pharmaceutical Medicine (Dip Pharm Med) for which the exit qualification was the Faculty’s Diploma in Pharmaceutical Medicine (DPM). This course was instrumental in setting up the DPM within the Royal Colleges and then later, FPM. For over 30+ years the Dip Pharm Med was the only feeder to the DPM. Sam also served on FPM’s education committee for two terms and more recently on the Strategic Oversight Committee for one term.
Sam completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Oklahoma, USA in 1978. He then returned to Cardiff, United Kingdom, where he completed his postgraduate degrees and since he has held a number of academic posts on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2015, following his retirement from Cardiff University, he joined the University of Hertfordshire. His major research interests are: pharmacoepidemiology and regulatory science; development, evaluation and application of instruments to assess patient-reported outcomes; pharmacoeconomics/health economics; and benefit-risk assessment of medicines. In addition, Sam’s current activity in the field of medicines development expands to: Capacity development in Africa coupled with the membership of the WHO Coalition of the Interested Party (CiP) for Regional and Global Regulatory Strengthening. So far, his engagement with this initiative in Africa has led to 34 full papers and three books for which he is the senior author and five PhD completion in the field of regulatory science. He serves as the Program Director and Module Chair for the King’s/GMPD Academy Certification Programme in Medicine Development/Medical Affair.
Sam has developed and directed a few undergraduate, postgraduate diploma and MSc courses over the past 40 years which they continue to be successful, of noteworthy: the 2-year modular part-time Postgraduate Course in Pharmaceutical Medicine (Dip Pharm Med) and was the Course Director for 30 years; he is the founder of the MSc in International Pharmaeconomic & Health Economics in 2006 and was the Programme Director until 2015; he is the founder of the Integrated Master of Regulatory Science (an undergraduate programme) which received approval from the University of Hertfordshire Validation Board in April 2017 and commenced in September 2018.
Sam is a fellow of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine of the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, Cardiff Medical Society, the European Society of Clinical Pharmacy and Global Fellow of the IFAAPP/GMPD Academy in Medicine Development. He is a member of five Editorial boards and has published 22 books and over 750+ journal articles and abstracts. He has developed and validated 11 general and disease-specific patient-reported outcome (PRO) measures, whilst also collaborating with the pharmaceutical industry to design PRO protocols for clinical trials. Increasingly, Professor Salek is shifting his emphasis towards the practical applications of PRO measures in clinical/policy decision-making and patient/family carer/partner engagement in research as partners/collaborators as well as towards family reported outcome measures (development and implementation).
