Sanjeevan Rajendran

I am a postdoctoral research scholar in the Department of Chemistry at the University of South Florida (USF). My current research focuses on engineering yeast for enhanced production of coral terpenes and transient expression of coral biosynthetic pathways in plant.

I earned my Ph.D. in Natural Products Chemistry from the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 2019. My doctoral research centered on plant- and fungi-derived secondary metabolites, including cyclic peptides, their biological activities, and transcriptomic analyses to elucidate their biosynthetic pathways. During my first postdoctoral appointment at the University of North Texas (UNT), I worked on the production of fungal medicinal compounds in plant and the isolation of metabolites from a bioherbicidal fungus, gaining extensive experience in synthetic biology.

Jonathon Simpson

Johnny is originally from Indiana, where he grew up surrounded by corn. When Johnny was a kid, he dreamed of moving to Florida to study sharks. Then one day, Johnny realized he loved corals and the terpenes they produce. He is currently pursuing studies of coral terpene biosynthesis. Outside of science, Johnny enjoys playing the violin and modelling.

Isabel Carley

I joined the lab in October of 2024 and works in drug discovery and medicinal chemistry. My experiments focus on the synthetic functionalization of diterpenoids to create a library of semi-synthetic analogs that are then screened for biological activity. Promising compounds undergo chemoproteomic experiments to shed light on the mechanism of action to pursue more target-based drug discovery. As an undergraduate I worked at Moffitt Cancer Center on the design and synthesis of dual inhibitors of p53/MDMX & p53/MDM2 as well as drug-like selective SIRT2 deacetylase inhibitors.