Highlighted Trainees

Jaclyn Winter was a graduate student in Professor Bradley Moore's lab at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego from 2005-2010 and was a NIH Marine Biotechnology Predoctoral Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award recipient from 2006-2008. After graduate school, Jackie went on to carry out two postdoctoral appointments. The first was from 2010-2011 with Professor Christian Hertweck at the Leibniz Institute for Natural Products Research and Infection Biology in the Hans Knoll Institute in Jena, Germany. The second was with Professor Yi Tang at UCLA from 2011-2014. In 2012, while in Yi Tang's lab, Jackie was awarded the L'Oreal USA Postdoctoral for Women in Science fellowship. In January 2015, Jackie started her independent career as an Assistant Professor in the department of Medicinal Chemistry in the College of Pharmacy at the University of Utah. In 2016, she was selected into the Vice President's Clinical and Translational Scholars Program at the University of Utah. 

Dr. Eduardo Esquenazi was a Biology Department graduate student jointly mentored in Professor Pieter Dorrestein’s (Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences) and Bill Gerwick’s laboratories (Scripps Institution of Oceanography).  He was an NIH Marine Biotechnology Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award recipient in 2009.  Following his degree, he established Sirenas LLC (formerly Sirenas Marine Discovery LLC) as its Chief Executive Officer and Founder. He is joined by longtime associate Jake Beverage (Chief Operating Officer, Co-Founder) and Professor Phil Baran (The Scripps Research Institute, Sultan of Synthesis and Co-Founder) and approximately twenty employees on the General Atomics campus in La Jolla, California. Sirenas has become a highly successful startup company that is integrating the vast chemical diversity of our oceans with big data informatics and next generation synthetic chemistries to expand the chemical diversity of biomedically significant molecules.  The most advanced Sirenas products to date are novel anticancer payloads for Antibody-Drug Conjugates, in addition the company is now building a pipeline of marine-inspired small molecule therapeutics in infectious disease and immuno-oncology.