TBBS Fellows - University Graduate School

Current TBBS Students

Lucas Bertolami

TBBS Fellow in Dr. Yuan Liu’s Lab

My name is Lucas Bertolami; I am a Biochemistry PhD student from Argentina. My interests have always been biology and genetics. I am currently working with RNA and the effects that OGG1 and APE1 have on RNA damage sites. In the future, I will be working with dCas9 to open the H3K27 histone covering the Frataxin gene with KDM6A and KDM6B demethylases in cardiac cells.

Andrea Arce

TBBS Fellow in Dr. Matthew DeGennaro’s Lab

Andrea Arce is a Biology PhD student in the DeGennaro laboratory. As a research assistant, she worked on mosquito reproduction and fertility of orco mutants and revertants. As a PhD student, her research entails the complexity of the human skin microbiome and its connection to female mosquito attraction. By understanding the mechanism of bacterial commensals in the production of volatile organic compounds, she hopes to provide information useful for the fight against arboviral-diseases affecting humans worldwide.

Alexi Switz

TBBS Fellow in Dr. Anamika Prasad’s Lab

Alexi Switz is a Biomedical Engineering PhD student researching in collaboration with the Prasad Lab for Materials Research and the Inclusive Complex Tissue Regeneration Laboratory under the supervision of Dr. Anamika Prasad and Dr. Darryl Dickerson. Alexi works on developing electrospinning hardware with the capabilities of creating nanofibers with controlled geometries. She produces aligned, helically coiled and random fibrous mats that she is characterizing and testing for a cardiac patch application in order to treat cardiac tissue damaged from myocardial infarction.

Samuel Aguero

TBBS Fellow in Dr. Konstantin Bukhryakov’s Lab

My research activities will include synthesis of Vanadium catalysts to do olefin metastases. My goal is to increase turnover numbers of the Vanadium catalysts doing olefin metasteses by tweaking the ligands within the structure. I am interested in research that requires significant amounts of organic and inorganic synthesis.

Hugo Bravo

TBBS Fellow in Dr. Yuan Liu’s Lab

My name is Hugo Bravo Gallegos and I am a neurodivergent individual with a deep love for conservation of the biological world. I arrived in this country with my family at an early age and I now wish to take full advantage of the opportunities that I have been given. I am currently a graduate student at FIU who has been accepted into the Biochemistry Ph.D. program. My research interests include the use of new technologies such as CRISPR/Cas9 to further research in conservation and medicine.

Laura Ochoa

TBBS Fellow in Dr. Laura Serbus’ Lab

Laura is a Biochemistry Ph.D. student with an interest in the symbiotic role of Wolbachia bacteria in insect cells. As a member of Dr. Laura Serbus’s lab, her project will focus on how Wolbachia interact with and manipulate insect cells at the molecular level. Identifying this mechanism will contribute to a fundamental understanding of host-microbe interactions as Wolbachia are present in over one million arthropod species and it would also greatly contribute to the advancement of human health concerns.

Kaylee Marrero

TBBS Fellow in Dr. Matthew DeGennaro’s Lab

Kaylee’s research in the Laboratory of Tropical Genetics focuses on the molecular basis for mosquito attraction to humans. Mosquito-borne diseases annually account for over one million deaths worldwide. She hopes to connect what makes some people more attractive to mosquitoes than others with the variability of each person’s skin microbiome. Using this, she hopes to create a more effective and long-lasting mosquito repellent that can potentially save lives.

Jeanpierre Fuente

TBBS Fellow in Dr. Prem Chapaign’s Lab

My name is Jeanpierre Fuente, and I am a Biochemistry PhD student at FIU. I was born and raised in Miami, FL and have a Peruvian background. Fun fact: I am the first one in my family to be born outside of Peru. If all things go well, I will also be the first in my entire family to receive a graduate-level degree. My research interest entails understanding the mechanism behind human repair systems and the immune system and how they interplay with one another. I hope to provide a better understanding of the human body through my research and provide some basis for a new method to analyze our health profiles.

Previous TBBS Students

German Mejia

TBBS Fellow in Dr. Fenfei Leng’s Lab

German’s research focus is working with Human Topoisomerase 2 inhibitors. Topoisomerase 2 inhibitors are used to treat cancer; however, the increased use of topoisomerase inhibitors has led to increased drug resistance. German’s current focus is working with a new doxorubicin and daunorubicin conjugate compound that has shown an increase cytotoxicity in drug resistant cancer cells.

Daniel Morales

TBBS Fellow in Dr. Jessica Liberles’ Lab

Daniel’s research focuses on the emerging viral pathogens, such as SARS-CoV-2 (the causative agent of COVID-19), and the evolutionary dynamics of post-translational modification markers on their proteins and the effects of these markers on interspecies transmission, infectivity, and pathogenesis. Identifying how these markers may enable emerging viral pathogens aid in these infectious processes, may elucidate novel methods for prevention and treatment of these infectious agents.

Julio Oliva

TBBS Fellow in Dr. Jorge Riera’s Lab

As Julio advances towards his PhD at the Neuronal Mass Dynamics Laboratory with Dr. Riera, he will support the development of simplified multi-layer neuronal models of the brain microcircuitry’s functionality during top-down control of cortical processing involved in higher cognitive functions of primates. As Julio develops computational tools that assist in the refinement of these models, there will be a many-sided impact mainly in the study of biophysical and multiscale modeling, understanding of cognitive and control functions and coordination and adaptation between humans and devices based on brain-computer interfaces. Julio also intends to apply what he learns to advance in the direction of improving existing Machine Learning and Deep Learning paradigms. This last idea is not new, but it never gets old.

Ana Valentin

TBBS Fellow in Dr. Joshua Hutchenson’s Lab

Ana is collaborating with the Biomedical Engineering Department as well as the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine, under the supervision of Dr. Joshua Hutcheson and Dr. Alexander Agoulnik, where she focuses on cardiovascular research. Currently, there is no existing treatment to resorb existing plaque in the cardiovascular system. Her project proposes the study of a small molecule relaxin agonist in its ability to reverse vascular calcification.

Maria Santiago

TBBS Fellow in Dr. Hoshang Unwalla’s Lab

Maria was a previous MARC U*STAR Fellow and is currently working towards a Ph.D. in Biochemistry. Maria’s primary goal is to develop a therapeutic approach to reverse lung function decline in HIV patients and cigarette smokers. Based on previous research, cigarette smoke and HIV infection dysregulate microRNAomics leading to the dysregulation of genes involved in airway innate immunity and mitochondrial homeostasis resulting in lung inflammation. Thus, by identifying aberrant microRNAs and determining possible candidate aptamers that can inhibit them, she aims to develop a therapeutic approach to reverse the lung function decline.

Rhyisa Armbrister

TBBS Fellow in Dr. Karen Abbott’s Lab

Rhyisa is a part of the translational glycobiology institute at FIU. Her research focuses on the development of a human antibody that has the ability to target a tumor glycan which is found to be overexpressed in ovarian cancer, lung cancer, and glioblastoma.

Florida Owens

TBBS Fellow in Dr. Nazira El-Hage’s Lab

Drug use takes the life of individuals daily, wrecks families and communities, and cripples the healthcare system. Exposure to drugs induces pathological drug-seeking and drug-taking behaviors that can persist for a lifetime. Drugs of abuse also present as cofactors to susceptibility of HIV infection and disease progression. Florida’s proposed study involves examining the epigenetic modifications in HIV-associated neurocognitive impairment with implications for drug addiction. The aims of the study involve investigating changes in expression levels of chromatin modifying enzymes potentially associated with HIV-pathology and drug seeking behavior, examining how epigenetic modulation contributes to HIV brain pathology and addictive behavior in a mouse model of substance use disorder, and finally, targeting epigenetic modulated genes in mouse model and analyze addictive behavior and HIV disease progression.

Jose Souchak

TBBS Fellow in Dr. Charles Dimitroff’s Lab

Jose’s research focuses on seeking novel glycobiological mechanisms of cancer metastasis and cancer cell glycan-probing-surveillance (GPS) treatments. This research hypothesizes that metastatic cancers contain unique glycan signatures that allow them to traffic and seed to distant sites. These unique signatures can be turned into a system to target these cancers with nano-particles loaded with anticancer therapeutics. There are currently 11 cancer cell lines being cultured, with plans in place to begin staining for the first round of markers.

Andrew Caceres

TBBS Fellow in Dr. Fenfei Leng’s Lab

Recent advancements in new-target antibiotics have been slow, and essentially non-existent. As bacteria continue to develop antibiotic- and multidrug-resistance, the world requires new ways to treat infections. Andrew’s research will focus on new antibacterial targets for bacteria such as Helicobacter Pylori, and the Enterobacteriaceae family.

Nicole Fernandez Tejero

TBBS Fellow in Dr. Bruce McCord’s Lab

Nicole is a Ph.D. student in Forensic Chemistry and is currently developing a DNA methylation marker capable of approximating an individual’s Body Mass Index (BMI) as well as give insight in to the individual’s diet. DNA methylation, one of several epigenetic modifications, has been studied extensively for the determination of body fluids, age, and various lifestyle traits such as alcohol consumption and tobacco and drug use. Determination of both BMI and diet of an individual will allow us to get a better understanding of the lifestyle and create a more detailed profile of a person. The development of a marker that can predict an individual’s BMI could be added to the ever-growing list of phenotypic markers that help investigators to create a representation of an unknown subject.

Victoria Godieva

TBBS Fellow in Dr. Jeremy Chambers’ Lab

Translocator protein 18kDa (TSPO) levels increase rapidly during brain injury, neuroinflammation, and in neurodegenerative disorders concurrent to the proliferation of microglia; however, the molecular function of TSPO in microglia has yet to be determined. TSPO is a transmembrane protein that spans the outer mitochondrial membrane, and mutations in TSPO are linked to mitochondrial metabolic deficiencies, including neurosteroid production. Recent studies suggest that TSPO can also affect the heme metabolism, and our bioinformatic analyses of TSPO structure reveal critical elements for heme binding are present in TSPO. Thus, the goal of Victoria’s research is to analyze heme metabolism and transport in wild type and TSPO-deficient microglia using metabolomic, proteomic, and established biochemical approaches to define the relationship between TSPO and heme metabolism and to provide insight into the functional significance of TSPO upregulation in human neurological disease.

Mayson Lin

TBBS Fellow in Dr. Matthew DeGennaro’s Lab

Postmortem interval (PMI) is a common method to estimate time period of death in forensic science. Carrion insects such as blowflies are applied to predict PMI based on the age of immature stages (from eggs to pupae). However, insect developmental rate in a human corpse has never been measured. In Mayson’s research, transgenic blowflies would be made to accurately recognize age of carrion insects based on the detection of fluorescent protein in maggots.

Marissa Perry

TBBS Fellow in Dr. Nazira El-Hage’s Lab

Over 50% of HIV infected patients also suffer from chronic pain conditions. Despite evidence suggesting that opioids enhance their chronic pain and leads to increased neuronal damage, Opioids are still the predominant prescribed analgesic. Marissa’s research aims to further elucidate how opioids increase the neuronal damage and search for alternative pain management approaches.

Alex Rodichkin

TBBS Fellow in Dr. Tomás Guilarte’s Lab

Manganese is an essential nutrient, but excess accumulation in the brain from occupational exposures results in a form of Parkinsonism with dystonia that is not responsive to L-dopa, the standard therapeutic treatment for idiopathic Parkinson’s disease, the second most common neurodegenerative disease in the world. Genetic mutations of SLC39A14, a Mn influx transporter, have been recently described with a clinical presentation of Parkinsonism with dystonia and increased blood and brain Mn. Humans with mutations in the SLC39A14 gene exhibit Parkinsonism that is not responsive to L-dopa therapy. Alex’s research project uses SLC39A14 knock-out mice to investigate the behavioral and neurochemical phenotypes resulting from increased systemic and brain Mn concentrations.

Jonathan Tabares

TBBS Fellow in Dr. Jin He’s Lab

Jonathan currently conducts research in Dr. Jin He’s Laboratory where he focuses on single molecule cellular biophysics. Jonathan investigates high-resolution multimodal imaging and sensing to explore biochemical changes associated with cell function. For example, using scanning ion conductance microscopy to image several cell activities on the cell membrane.

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