About

Lee Hagey

This project is part of a life-long study into the evolution of bile salts in different vertebrate species. Unlike many metabolic molecules that are identical in species ranging from bacteria to mammals, bile salts in different species show a variety of structures reflective of their phylogeny, diet, and bacterial flora.  Within the pages of the above book on bile acids, you will find my attempt to categorize the bile salt structures in different species, and to interpret and understand the evolutionary forces that have lead up to the observed changes.

Pieter Dorrestein

Emily Gentry

Emily received her B.S. in Chemistry from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2013. She then moved to New Jersey and got her Ph.D. in Chemistry from Princeton University in 2018. During her Ph.D., she developed new strategies for the synthesis of pyrroloindoline natural products. Now, as a postdoc with Prof. Pieter Dorrestein in sunny San Diego, she is working to discover new bile acids from the gut microbiome.

Andres Mauricio Caraballo Rodriguez, PhD

Andrés Mauricio Caraballo Rodríguez received his Ph.D. (2017) and a M.S. (2013) in Sciences from University of São Paulo (Brazil) for his work on natural products from microbial interactions of endophytes at the laboratory of Prof. Mônica T. Pupo. He received a M.S. in Biosciences and Law from Universidad Nacional de Colombia (2011) for his work related to access to genetic resources and benefit sharing. He received his B. Sc. in Pharmacy from the same institution in Colombia (2006). He is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at laboratory of Prof. Pieter Dorrestein, Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences – UCSD. His expertise areas include detection, isolation, and structural characterization of small molecules by using Mass Spectrometry and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. He is fascinated with understanding the role small molecules play in nature as they might be involved in driving animal and plant behavior. Therefore, at the Dorrestein lab he applies different approaches such as metabolomics and data visualization that lead to reveal the chemistry behind different living systems.

Morgan Panitchpakdi

Morgan received her B.S. in Biochemistry and Cell Biology from the University of California at San Diego and began working in the Dorrestein Lab as a staff research associate in August 2017. She has worked on a variety of projects in the Dorrestein Lab using mass spectrometry to identify unique chemical signatures of foods and animals and to better understand how bile acids function as signaling molecules.

Jasmine Zemlin

Zdenek  Kamenik

Nina Acebo