Maya Thanou is a Senior Lecturer in the Institute of Pharmaceutical Science, King’s College London.

She finished her PhD in LACDR (Leiden/Amsterdam Centre for Drug Research) in 2000 in the area of the delivery of therapeutics for cancer treatment before taking an academic appointment in the School of Pharmacy, Cardiff University as Lecturer in Polymer Therapeutics and Drug Delivery.

In 2004 she was awarded the prestigious Dorothy Hodgkin Royal Society Research Fellowship and she continued research at Imperial College, at the Department of Chemistry and the Genetic Therapies Centre, in the area of cancer genetic therapies. She moved on in her current post in 2009 where she is focusing her research in the area of Chemical Biology and Drug Delivery.

She is the author of 80 peer reviewed papers and chapters. She is the key inventor of 8 patents all in the area of formulation and drug delivery. Three of these patents are for novel formulations for MRgFUS.

She is currently focusing on the design and development of theranostic nanoparticles. Her research can be summarised on engineering image guided cancer targeted nanoparticles, as novel drug delivery devices.