Jose Rodriguez Medina, National Committee Member NAIPI.
He is an independent investigator in the field of the molecular biology of yeast for the past 27 years while serving as a member of the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Puerto Rico Medical Sciences Campus (UPR-MSC) in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
He currently serves as Professor and Chair of the Department of Biochemistry and as Associate Director of Research, Compliance, and Development for the UPR Medical Sciences Campus. He is also Program Director of the NIGMS Puerto Rico IDeA Networks for Biomedical Research Excellence (PR-INBRE) and supervises several instrumentation cores for the NIMHD RCMI Program and the Puerto Rico Clinical and Translational Research Consortium (PRCTRC) at UPR-MSC.
His research has been focused on topics related to myosin type II and associated cell wall phenotypes of myosin II-deficient (myo1delta) yeast strains, gene expression profiling of these strains, and the mechanism of stress signaling, particularly through the PKC1 pathway, in the response to heat shock and cell wall stress.
He has supervised 11 Ph.D. student dissertations during his 27-year career.
Over the years Dr. Medina has accrued extensive administrative experience, having served as Biochemistry Department Chair since 1997, President of the Association of Medical and Graduate Departments of Biochemistry in 2013, Associate Director of the UPR Medical Science Campus Center for Research Compliance and Development 2015-2017, Acting Associate Vice-President for Research and Innovation at the University of Puerto Rico 2017-2018, Interim Dean for Research at the UPR-MSC from 2018 to the present, and his current position as Principal Investigator of the Puerto Rico IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence (PR-INBRE) since 2013.