Areas I Teach
Educational History
PhD, Medicinal Chemistry--University of Washington
BS, Chemistry--Gonzaga University
Practice/Research Interests
My overall focus is to contribute to scientific discovery and the effective use of medicines through collaborative science, teaching, mentoring, and active membership in the research community. As an ADMET scientist (Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, Excretion, and Toxicity) with doctoral training in medicinal chemistry, I strive to discover mechanistic, structural, and kinetic details that contribute to variability in drug response and to inform the design of new therapeutic agents.
My research seeks to better understand and identify modulators of nicotine metabolism and nicotine addiction. Thus far, this work has focused on the inhibition of cytochrome P450 2A6 (CYP2A6), the major drug metabolizing enzyme responsible for nicotine clearance in humans. Together with my collaborators, we have identified several synthetic and naturally occurring time-dependent inhibitors of CYP2A6. The naturally occurring inhibitors are present in many vaping fluids and cannabis products. We have patented the synthetic inhibitors as potential cessation agents for future development. We use evidence from mechanistic enzymology experiments, in vitro-to-in vivo pharmacokinetic extrapolation models, and translational studies to predict changes in nicotine metabolism in humans due to exposure to these inhibitors. In short, we use a variety of approaches to predict the potential clinical relevance of drug-drug and natural product-drug interactions between nicotine and the inhibitors we identify.
Nicotine metabolism is highly variable in the human population and genetics are a major contributor to this variability. My collaborators and I also study genetic variants of CYP2A6 to better understand how the inhibitors we have identified may differentially influence nicotine metabolism, in comparison to the most common genetic version of CYP2A6 (*1). The evidence from this work helps provide the structural and mechanistic basis for interindividual differences in nicotine metabolism and can help inform in vitro-to-in vivo model predictions to better account for genetic variability in the inhibition of nicotine metabolism by drugs and natural products.
A list of publications can be found on .
For more information, please review .
Outside the Classroom
I'm fortunate to be a husband, and the father of three kids, and thus have a very full family life. It's wonderful to live in the Pacific Northwest, but I also like to travel when we can. I enjoy a wide variety of sports (e.g., basketball, baseball, running, and etc.), music, and movies. Early in my career I was a chemical officer in the US Army, and worked as a synthetic chemist at Molecular Probes, in Eugene, Oregon. Early in my academic career I also had the opportunity to work at Eli Lilly as a Visiting Academic Scientist, which was a great learning experience.