Department News
Faculty Awards and In The News
Dr. Jorge Gardea-Torresdey
Dr. Mahesh Narayan
Dr. Carlos Cabrera
Welcome New Faculty!
Dr. Amol Kulkarni
Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry
akulkarni@utep.edu
Dr. Kulkarni joins UTEP from Howard University in Washington DC where he was a tenured Associate Professor in the College of Pharmacy. The research in his group is focused on the discovery of rationally-designed small molecules with anti-inflammatory and antiretroviral activity. Particularly, his group is developing small molecule inhibitors of the NLRP3 inflammasome for the treatment of neuroinflammation-associated disease states, such as, Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD), HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders (HAND), and traumatic brain injury. His group is also developing small molecule inhibitors of HIV-1 Nef for the treatment of HIV-associated comorbidities. Dr. Kulkarni’s research is funded by the National Institutes of Health (R21NS129478-01, 1R21NS133895-01, 3U54MD007597-34S5, and 3U54MD007597-34S2). At UTEP, Dr. Kulkarni will continue his research on preclinical drug discovery in the fields of immunology and virology. A selection of his recent awards includes Professor of the Year awards (2017, 2019, and 2023) from the College of Pharmacy, Howard University, Faculty of the Year Award from the Alumni Association, Howard University. Dr. Kulkarni was appointed as the Associate Editor of the Journal Inflammation in 2023.
Dr. Yupeng Li
Assistant Professor, Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences
Adjunct Faculty, Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry
yli10@utep.edu
Dr. Li joins UTEP from the University of Minnesota (UMN) where he served as a research assistant professor in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry and completed postdoctoral studies affiliated with the UMN Masonic Cancer Center. His previous postdoctoral research took place at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester. His research focuses on using mass spectrometry-based analytical biochemistry techniques and aims to address the mechanisms of carcinogenesis caused by tobacco use, develop biomarkers for cancer etiology studies, and promote chemopreventative agents into clinicals. His research also focuses on small molecule drug discovery and development with a focus on targeting key proteins in DNA to repair pathways or other pivotal signaling pathways in tumorigenesis. Dr. Li earned a doctoral degree in medicinal chemistry from the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Guangzhou, China; and a Bachelor of Science in traditional Chinese medicine from Tongji Medical School, Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China. He is a member of the American Chemical Society. He expresses his enthusiasm for collaborating with UTEP faculty members in the realms of drug discovery and development, as well as biomarker studies utilizing high-resolution mass spectrometry. Notably, he has taken the lead in a project involving the growth of tobacco using 13CO 2 labeling, a venture that has encompassed the plants' lifecycle from seed germination to flowering since 2019.
Dr. Robert Pankow
Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry
rmpankow@utep.edu
Dr. Pankow joins UTEP from Northwestern University where he was a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Professor Tobin J. Marks as a recipient of the Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Fellowship. His research interests include design and synthesis of functional organic materials, polymer synthesis and characterization, organic synthesis, organometallics, sustainable chemistry, and organic electronics. At UTEP, his research group will be developing the next generation of conjugated polymers with a keen focus on self-healing materials, stimuli responsive polymers, and mechanochemistry. Dr. Pankow earned his B.A. in Chemistry from UC Santa Barbara (2012) and his M.S. in Chemistry from CSU Northridge (2015). He then earned his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Southern California (2020) under the guidance of Professor Barry C. Thompson. A selection of his recent awards includes the 2019 MRS Spring Meeting Symposium Poster Award, G.K. Surya Prakash Award (2020), KAUST Solar Center Young Scientist Award (2022), and ORISE Success Story (2023). He is a member of the American Chemical Society, the Materials Research Society, and a member of the Community Board for Materials Horizons.
Dr. Hamidreza Sharifan
Assistant Professor, Forensic Science Program, Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry
hsharifan@utep.edu
Dr. Sharifan joined UTEP from Albany State University with research on environmental chemistry and forensics. He received his Ph.D. from Texas A&M University, focusing on the remediation of heavy metals in soil using nanomaterials, and an MSc in Environmental Process engineering from Stuttgart University in Germany. He conducted his postdoc at the University of California Davis and Colorado State University on GHG emissions from wastewater and fingerprinting of PFAS contaminants. He also worked on biotoxins and the transfer rate of polar organic pollutants at the Marine Research Institute of Alfred Wagner (AWI) in Germany and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ). He has been an active reviewer for well-known journals such as ACS ES&T, and he received the Global Peer Review Award for being the top 1% reviewer in the field of environmental science. He is a member of the American Chemical Society and a scientific committee member for the International Conference on Water Resources Management & Sustainability: Solutions for Arid Regions in the UAE and Desert Technology XV in Jordan. He has taught many environmental chemistry and forensics courses and mentored students from historically underrepresented communities in science.
Other News
Awards and Accolades
-Summer 2023 Graduate Student Internships-
The Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry Graduate Students have embarked on numerous professional development opportunities in the form of summer internships and research programs.
Kavish Saini (Sreenivasan Group) - Sandia National Laboratory
Kavish is in Albuquerque, New Mexico working in the Center of Integration Nanotechnologies (CINT). His DOE project focus is on ultra-low disorder graphene quantum dot-based spin qubits for cyber secure fossil energy.
Juan Luna (Fortier Group) - Sandia National Laboratory
Juan is in Livermore, California participating in the Minority Serving Institutions Internship Program (MSIIP), under the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in the Department of Energy (DOE). His research this summer is focused on the optimization of synthesis, isolation and characterization of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) for functionalization using thio-containing substrates to analyze/understand charge and energy transfer at the femtosecond to picosecond of these monolayered plasmonic molecules.
Gabriela Molina Aguirre (Vukovic Group) - Halliburton Energy
Gabriela is in Houston, Texas participating in the Halliburton 2023 Summer Internship as an R&D intern. Her research this summer is focused on corrosion inhibition chemistry.
Anju Yadav (Vukovic Group) - Los Alamos National Laboratory
Anju is in Los Alamos, New Mexico at Los Alamos National Laboratory participating in the Biological Sciences Graduate Internship Program, working on a variety of biological science-related research and projects.
Texas Academy of Science Annual Meeting
The Texas Academy of Science Annual Meeting was held March 3-4, 2023 in San Angelo, TX . Our department was very well represented.
- Kiana Holbrook - Lee Group
- Elected as Student Board Member of the Texas Academy of Science Board of Directors
- Daniel von Salzen - Bernal Group
- Overall Winner: Graduate Student Oral Competition
- Laisha Ramirez - Narayan Group
- 1st Place: Poster Award in Neuroscience Section
- Sophia Ronquillo - Bernal Group
- 2nd Place: Poster Award in Cell and Molecular Biology Section
Congrats to all!
Graduates in the News
Class of 2017 (PhD)
Dr. Adrian Enriquez, a 2017 UTEP Biochemistry graduate and a current postdoctoral fellow at La Jolla Institute for Immunology receives a Postdoctoral Enrichment Program Award. Read about it here.
Open Job Positions & Opportunities
