Biography

I was born in Lima, Peru and in 2001, I immigrated to the United States and settled in Coral Springs, FL. In 2014, I graduated from the University of Florida with a B.S. in Interdisciplinary Studies in Medicinal Chemistry and Molecular Genetics. While at UF, I conducted research in medicinal chemistry in the lab of the late Prof Alan R Katritzky. My senior thesis focused on incorporation of a new chemical group onto quinine and demonstrating the increased potency of these novel antimalarial analogues. Seeing the power that chemistry can have in developing innovative therapies against human disease inspired me to work at the Broad Institute of Harvard & MIT in the lab of Prof Stuart L Schreiber. At the Broad, I developed a methodology for arriving at chiral sulfamidate fragments, which will be further used in fragment based drug design efforts.As a Gates Cambridge Scholar, I will pursue an MPhil in Chemistry under the supervision of Prof Steven V Ley. My research focused on developing a new methodology for designing functionalized stapled peptides. These stapled peptides target an important biological factor in cancer, and our methodology is applicable to designing stapled peptide therapeutics for a variety of diseases where protein-protein interactions can be targeted. After my MPhil at Cambridge, I am pursuing an M.D.-Ph.D. at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania to train as a physician scientist and continue to incorporate chemistry into developing novel therapeutics to combat human disease.

Previous Education

University of Florida