Adrian Guerrero, B.Sc.

Research Interests

Adrian Guerrero received his B.Sc. in Chemistry from the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley in 2015. As an undergraduate, he joined a collaborative research initiative between the organic synthesis group of Dr. Bimal Banik at the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley, and the molecular pharmacology laboratory of Dr. John Short at the UT Health Science Center in San Antonio seeking to develop chemotherapeutic agents for multidrug resistant forms of cancer (2012). His early work in helping to both synthesize and characterize a group of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon derivatives as novel cytotoxic agents capable of circumventing MDR1 mediated drug resistance in-vitro earned him an undergraduate research fellowship with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

He then worked with Dr. Carol Taylor of the Louisiana State University (2013), where he helped to advance the enantioselective synthesis of amino acid residues critical to the total synthesis of the bicyclic dodecapeptide Theonellamide C. He went on to work with Dr. Stuart Schreiber of the Broad Institute of Harvard & MIT (2014-2015) where he learned to apply principles of diversity oriented synthesis toward the development of chiral fragment libraries for high-throughput drug screening efforts.

Adrian joined the Medicinal Chemistry Section of the Molecular Targets and Medications Discovery Branch as a post-baccalaureate IRTA Fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Amy H. Newman in 2016 where he now works to create highly selective ligands for the D2-like receptor family with the goal of developing research tools which may help to elucidate the relevance of these specialized receptor populations to pathological behavioral states.