In July 2023, we changed our name from AACC (short for the American Association for Clinical Chemistry) to the Association for Diagnostics & Laboratory Medicine (ADLM). The following page was written prior to this rebranding and contains mentions of the association’s old name. It may contain other out-of-date information as well.
1987 International Travel Fellowship
Pokar M. Kabra received the 9th AACC International Fellowship Award, sponsored by Becton Dickinson Vacutainer Systems, Becton Dickinson and Company.
Dr. Kabra was born in India. He received his B.S. degree in chemistry in 1964 from the University of Bombay, India. He also received training in pharmaceutics and received the B.Sc. (Technology) degree from the University of Bombay in 1966. He was then appointed lecturer at the Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute at the University of Bombay for a period of six months.
In 1967, Dr. Kabra obtained a research fellowship from the Department of Medicinal Chemistry, University of Kansas, Lawrence, where he received his doctorate in 1971. He then went to the University of Wisconsin to continue his research training in medicinal chemistry as a postdoctoral fellow. In 1973, he joined Dr. Victor Levin’s research laboratories at the Brain Tumor Research Center at the University of California, San Francisco, to study the metabolism and pharmacokinetics of cancer chemotherapeutic agents. In 1975, he joined the Department of Laboratory Medicine as a Clinical Chemistry Fellow and worked with his mentor, Dr. Laurence J. Marton, on the application of liquid chromatography in clinical analysis. In 1977 he was appointed as an assistant professor of laboratory medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He was promoted to associate professor in 1981.
Dr. Kabra has extensive research interest in clinical liquid chromatography, therapeutic drug monitoring, and clinical toxicology. He pioneered the early application of liquid chromatography in clinical analysis of endogenous and exogenous compounds. He has developed and published several innovative methods for the routine analysis of anti-epileptic agents, aminoglycoside antibiotics, antiarrhythmic agents, and cyclosporine, employing novel solid-phase extraction techniques interfaced with high speed liquid chromatography. He has published over 70 papers, including 20 chapters and three books on his research, and has presented many invited lectures in many national and international meetings.
A member of AACC since 1976, Dr. Kabra currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Chromatography (Biomedical Applications) and the Journal of Liquid Chromatography. He is an active member of AACC, treasurer of the TDM and Clinical Toxicology division of AACC, ACS, AAAS, ACLPS, and Sigma Xi.
Dr. Kabra is active in the education of medical technologists, graduate students, and residents in laboratory medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He has an active interest in teaching and training of clinical chemists in the developing countries. He initiated and set up a state-of-the-art therapeutic drug monitoring laboratory at the Bombay Hospital in Bombay in 1983 during his sabbatical leave. During the coming year Dr. Kabra intends to set up a similar laboratory in Beijing, China.