Hector Alejandro Contreras Sanchez

Dr. Sanchez earned a Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of California, Santa Cruz after an amazing NSF Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Prof. Phil Crews lab. She returned to UCSC to work for Prof. Roger Linington as an NSF graduate research fellow. She then joined Prof. Pieter Dorrestein's lab at UC San Diego as an NIH IRACDA Fellow and her research focused on establishing methods for probing and characterizing metabolic exchanges in polymicrobial communities, specifically those associated with cheese rinds. Since 2015, she has been in her independent position at UIC and her NIH and NSF funded research program utilizes a variety of mass spectrometry techniques to probe how cells and microbes use chemistry to coordinate activities in a variety of biological systems.