The College of Pharmacy’s Faculty Development Seminar on February 12, 2019 focused on the use of Design Expert software. It was delivered by Dr. Ibrahim ElSayed, Associate Professor and Associate Dean – Academic College of Pharmacy.
The seminar provided an overview on Design Expert ® software which is a professional statistical tool used to create the experimental design, study the effects of different factors with the least possible number of trials and optimize the designed process through simultaneous selection of the desired level of each employed factor. Different statistical plans can be utilized as full factorial, response surface and mixture designs. Response surface is the most commonly used design in pharmaceutical research, and it includes different sub-designs; e.g. central composite and Box-Behnken. Before starting the experimental part, the studied factors and traced responses are loaded into the Design Expert ® software to determine the number and compositions/conditions of the experimental trials. After finishing the experimental work, the obtained data is fed into the software to assign different desirability values to the conducted experimental trials. Consequently, researchers can select the optimum trial having the maximum desirability value to be subjected to further investigations.