Las Vegas, Nevada, United States
Therapy Consultant (Structural Heart) at Medtronic, the world’s leading medical technology company. Earned a Master of Science in Biomedical Science from Rutgers University and a BS in Microbiology from San Francisco State University, where several academic awards were also earned, including a NSF scholarship and the MBRS-RISE fellowship.
Invisible Sentinel, now a part of bioMérieux, is dedicated to providing first-in-class DNA detection tools. The company’s platform technology, Veriflow®, is an innovative, game-changing DNA Signature Capturing Technology making rapid molecular detection more accessible and easier to use, with exceptional accuracy and specificity. Our focus on innovation, and commitment to providing leading edge solutions to our customers, led to the development of our newest platform, Veripro®. Veripro incorporates key elements from our core system and is compatible with RT-PCR systems to empower multiplexed assays and high throughput analyses, meeting the needs of our evolving customer base.
Tyger Scientific is a research and manufacturing organization supplying organic specialty chemicals, globally for the pharmaceutical, biotech, and chemical industries. We are staffed with Ph.D organic chemists and offer services that include custom synthesis and toll manufacturing, low cost large scale production through partnering factories in Asia, process improvement, and contract research. My work at Tyger includes leading new client acquisition for custom chemical synthesis. I was involved in all aspects of marketing and sales of commodity products as well custom projects. I also contributed to ISO compliance as an internal SME and participate in supplier audits and QA. My role included negotiating contract terms for domestic and international chemical procurement. I have also conducted extensive analysis of chemical import/export data from the Americas and China to identify opportunities to offer buyers more competitive and aggressive pricing bids to acquire new customers.
Development of TMEM16a modulators is useful to probe the basic biochemical and biophysical characteristics and physiological functions of this relatively new class of chloride channels. TMEM16a inhibitors decrease CaCC function in vascular smooth muscle cells, relaxing murine and human blood vessels, providing support for TMEM16a as an anti-hypertensive drug target. TMEM16a inhibitors have recently been shown to inhibit proliferation of pancreatic cancer cells, demonstrating new potential for anti-cancer applications. It has also been shown that TMEM16a mRNA and protein are highly expressed in LNCaP and PC-3 cells, implicating the possibility that TMEM16a is involved in prostate cancer. Since the molecular identity and structure of these proteins is still unclear, a group of scientists at UCSF, led by Prof. Alan Verkman screened roughly 110,000 compounds and discovered that there were four main classes of molecules that fully inhibited TMEM16a and had an IC50<10μM. We worked on optimizing one class of these molecules, substituted aryl thiazoles, to potentially give us an IC50 value less than 1μM. The central hypothesis of this project was to explore the chemical structure of the aryl thiazole lead inhibitor scaffold, to generate new inhibitors with improved potency.
Grader and student assistant for Dr. Scott Eagon's Organic Chemistry 1 and Organic Chemistry 2 courses.
TA for Professor James (Jim) Halligan's statistics course. I tutored students, helped teach the discussion section of the course, graded assignments, and entered scores.