The overall aim of this body of work is to design self-assembled soft matter phases for the administration of pharmaceuticals, with the current focus on understanding phases as they are loaded with drug molecules. This initial work will provide proof-of-principle with simple, model compounds. We have already selected promising phases that exhibit the desired structural, rheological and diffusion characteristics. However, we need to understand how the phase characteristics (internal structure such as lamellar spacings, microstructural phase separations) change when the phases are loaded with active molecules. These experiments will highlight structural and mechanistic features crucial to developing these materials further.