Dr. Quesada is a full professor and faculty member of the Physical Sciences Department and Chemistry Department at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), and has been the MARC U·STAR and RISE Program Coordinator for the past twelve two years. He is also the Principal Investigator of the UPR Asthma Awareness and STEM Program sponsored by the NIH.  Dr. Quesada has been in charge of the UPR RISE Seminar Series in the Frontiers of Cellular, Molecular, and Chemical Biology. This activity aims to provide a weekly forum in which all aspects of biomedical research are presented to undergraduate and graduate students and the campus faculty. In addition, Dr. Quesada has been in charge of the weekly RISE Recruitment Seminar. Also, he coordinated different workshops in professional development and state-of-the-art scientific techniques. Dr. Quesada's efforts to increase the number of students who become interested and participate in productive research experiences in biomedically related areas have been excellent, almost a 90% of RISE participating students enter doctoral programs in the past 10 years and 100% of the undergraduate's students participated in summer research experiences. Dr. Quesada's commitment to preparing the trainees for oral and poster presentations has been evidenced by the number of prizes the MARC and RISE undergrad won every year at the ABRCMS meeting.   

 

In addition, Dr. Quesada is an active researcher in the field of lipidomics and protein-membrane structure and function. He has extensive experience handling tissues, biological membranes, and cells for the appropriate determination and quantification of lipid composition.  Dr. Quesada has vast experience in the application of GC, GC-MS, HPLC-MSMS, and MALDI Tof for the analysis of lipids and proteins, extraction protocols, and validation of data acquisition through mass spectrometry.  He has experience in protein crystal diffraction and has been a user of the Advance Photon Source sector 23-ID at Argonne National Laboratories for the past 5 years. In addition to the mentorship of the MARC and RISE students, Dr. Quesada has a successful record of mentoring undergraduate and graduate students, (almost 100 students), working on his research projects.