Research Focus
Nathalia Rodrigues de Almeida, Ph.D., is an organic chemist with expertise in medicinal chemistry. She was born and raised in Brazil, where she received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. She worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. There her research was focused on the synthesis of small molecules including deregulators of cylindrical proteases with anti-chlamydial activity and synthesis of peptide amphiphiles (PAs) and antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) with potent antibacterial activity against gram-positive and gram-negative strains. She also developed self-assembled PAs with synergistic antibacterial activity in combination with antibiotics with potential drug delivery applications.
Currently, she is part of Dr. Huang’s lab and the mass spectrometry lab conducting research in metabolomics and lipidomics. Her research focuses on profiling and identifying small bacterial metabolites and lipids that bind antigen-presenting cell receptors to stimulate unconventional T cells and other immune cells. She is also involved in establishing metabolomic and lipidomic platforms to identify and characterize biologically important compounds related to immune responses, bacterial infections, and cancer.
Main technologies and Methods used
- Synthesis of small molecules and peptides
- Structural elucidation of organic compounds
- Purification of organic compounds (small molecules and peptides)
- High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC)
- Mass spectrometry (MS)
- Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)
- Cell Culture
- ELISpot
- Bacteria culture
- Antibacterial assays