Pharmaceutical engineering is still a new but rapidly growing engineering field in academia. Therefore, it is important to be able to define its range of activities, since any academic program devoted to it must operate within these boundaries. Because of their novelty, pharmaceutical engineering curricula and the courses that constitute them need to be identified, and their contents must be defined, without the benefit of relying on significant previous experience in this area.

This presentation examines the current status of pharmaceutical engineering education in general, and the educational programs currently available in this area in particular, with specific reference to the Pharmaceutical Engineering program which has was established at NJIT in 2002.

The discussion of what constitutes the common knowledge in the evolving area of pharmaceutical engineering in an academic curriculum is an ongoing debate, and constitutes an additional focus of this contribution. An examination of the approach that should be taken to determine the range and extent of the core knowledge and activities in the rapidly expanding pharmaceutical engineering field will be presented and discussed.