First graduated student!

Today is truly a landmark in our lab because on this day, María Eugenia “Maru” Sandoval-Salinas has defended her thesis and has thus obtained her B. Sc. in Chemistry. She is the first student under my supervision to achieve this goal, and I hope it won’t be long until we get some more, although now the bar has been set quite high. For the time being, Maru is pursuing a career in the pharmaceutical industry but has every intention of coming back to the lab for her Masters degree; she has a reserved spot here with us at CCIQS.

Maru’s thesis deals mainly, but not exclusively, with calculating the interaction energies of calix- and thia-calix[n]arenes with the tyrosine kinase inhibitor Imatinib, which is widely used in the treatment of Chronic Myeloid Leukemia (CML), in order to rationally design a drug delivery agent for this drug. Her work is (a huge) part of an article currently under revision that I only wish had been published before her defense. Still, we await for that paper to be published in the next few weeks.

Throughout her stay at our lab, Maru was a dedicated student willing to learn new skills every time. As she replied today to one of the questions: “it’s not so much how many calculations I got right, but how many I got wrong!“. I find deep meaning in this sentence, perhaps deep enough as to consider it an aphorism, because indeed the more we try the more we fail, and the more we fail the more we learn and the closer we get to success.

Congratulations, Maru! I personally thank you for all the hard work invested in your thesis, all the long hours in front of the computer and your disposition to learn and work during the last 1.5 years. I’m certain you’ll find success in any venture you undertake; and I’m certain of it because you never stop trying.