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Pharmaceutics welcomes six new students with a passion for discovery

Pharmaceutics graduate students (L to R): Ryan Cheu, Olena Anoshchenko, Jessie Yu, Antonio Quinones-Lopez (not pictured here: Marc Vrana and John Amory).
Pharmaceutics graduate students (L to R): Ryan Cheu, Olena Anoshchenko, Jessie Yu, Antonio Quinones-Lopez (not pictured: Marc Vrana and John Amory). Photo: Alex Levine Photography

 

UWSOP’s Department of Pharmaceutics welcomed six new students this fall, here to join a great tradition of life-changing research. These researchers share a passion for discovery and come to our school from all over the world, and from all sorts of backgrounds: from English majors to chemists and biologists.

Originally from the Ukraine, Lena Anoshchenko finished her International Baccalaureate degree in Pearson United World College in Victoria, Canada, with 200 students from 100 countries around the world before going to college at Lewis & Clark in Portland, Oregon. She earned her BS in Biology and came to appreciate the value of multicultural and liberal arts education. After graduation, she moved to Seattle and worked at Gilead Sciences, Fred Hutch, and Infectious Disease Research Institute (IDRI) on projects related to drug discovery and development. She is interested in drug research and elucidation of relevant biological mechanisms.

Marc Vrana, who grew up in California and Washington, earned his undergraduate degree at the UW in English Literature and Education. From there, he pivoted and enrolled at UW Bothell to earn a second bachelor’s degree, this time in Biology. He worked in a lab researching experimental evolution of microbial co-cultures before moving into the lab of Pharmaceutics’ assistant professor Bhagwat Prasad. He is currently working on characterizing the inter-tissue variability in expression of ADME proteins, and will be likely be focusing on carboxylesterases. At the most recent North American ISSX conference, Marc received a best poster award as well as placing first in the pre-doctoral poster/podium presentation award competition.

Antonio Quinones-Lopez was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in the Austin Texas area. He earned his bachelor of science in Chemistry and Spanish at Southwestern University, a small liberal arts college in central Texas. He has mainly worked on synthesis of inorganic metal complexes and their in vitro interaction with DNA. In 2014-2015, he was named an American Chemical Society Scholar. His general research interests are in drug transport and delivery.

Originally from Hawaii, Ryan Cheu received his bachelors in Biochemistry from Santa Clara University. He spent a summer as a medical intern in Nepal at the Hospital for Rehab and Disabled Children. For the last two years, he worked at Genentech using FT-NIR and chemometrics for determining residual moisture in lyophilized drug products. He’s developed IEC, iCIEF, and MCE-SDS methods for late-stage drug analysis of Genentech’s drug products and drug substances.

Jesse Yu was born in Montreal, Canada. He earned his B.S. in Pharmaceutical Sciences and Pharm. D from Duquesne University. His research experiences includes solid state and liposomal formulation. He spent a summer with Amgen at their Cambridge, Massachusetts, site working as an intern in a preclinical PK lab and also spent 10 weeks at the FDA working as an intern in regulatory affairs.

Dr. John Amory
Dr. John Amory

Dr. John Amory earned his Medical Degree from the University of California, San Francisco where he also completed his residency in Internal Medicine. Currently, he is Professor of Medicine and Section Head of General Internal Medicine here at the UW where he works as an attending physician on the inpatient medicine wards and in the General Internal Medicine Clinic. His research interests are the development of novel forms of male contraception and new approaches to the treatment of men with infertility. John has published more than 115 peer-reviewed papers in the field of male reproduction, and holds current funding from the NIH grant for male contraceptive research examining the potential utility of inhibitors of testicular retinoic acid biosynthesis as reversible male contraceptives.

Interested in applying for an MS or PhD in Pharmaceutics? Click here.