Dr Gurpreet Khraund, PhD, MSc, MPharm, PGCE
17th December 1976 – 3rd August 2020
Students and staff of the former Department of Chemistry in Canterbury will be saddened to learn of the death of our alumnus, Gurpreet Khraund, in a tragic road accident on 3rd August while returning home from work.
Gurpreet enrolled on our B.Sc. Chemistry course in 1995 and continued onto a M.Sc. programme in inorganic chemistry after which he completed a Ph.D. degree in the same discipline at King’s College, London. Study and qualification were almost a way of life for him as he then pursued both a PGCE course at Oxford and a M.Pharm. degree at the Medway School of Pharmacy. He then returned to Canterbury to work at Boots on Wincheap, but even at the time of his untimely death he was working to complete a M.Sc. in clinical pharmacy.
To those who knew him, Gurpreet was a diffident, thrifty and very trusting person. He never spoke an ill word about anyone nor could he understand why others were any different in such respects. He had an underlying instinct for business, his ambition being to one-day buy and run his own pharmacy and towards that end he was carefully managing his resources. However, I shall always remember him as a kindly young man, who even after his leaving UKC and after my retirement, would visit me on a regular basis to check on my wellbeing, typically contacting me at the onset of the COVID pandemic to offer his help in any way he could. Having lost his father six years ago, he was devoted to his sisters, Amandeep and Sanjeet, and their mother. They, most of all, will miss him greatly and it is to them that we offer our deepest commiseration.
Written by: Richard G. Jones, Emeritus Professor of Polymer Science