Andy Eleazar Renteria

Raised in the relatively rural town of Emporia, Kansas, Andy's dedication to education is a product of the love and support of his parents, Eleazar and Silvia Renteria, two working class immigrants from Mexico. As an undergraduate student at Emporia State University, he majored in chemistry and physics. The bulk of his undergraduate research with Dr. Diane Nutbrown consisted of synthetic organic chemistry with the aim of synthesizing a lithium-specific, intracellular fluorescent sensor to track lithium in cells for bipolar disorder studies. While Andy still loves chemistry, an internship in Dr. Michail Lionakis’s lab at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases revealed that he enjoys stepping out of his comfort zone and desires a more interdisciplinary education. In the Lionakis lab, he studied the downstream effects of IL-22 cytokine deficiency in the context of autoimmune polyendocrinopathy-candidiasis-ectodermal dystrophy (APECED) using mouse models. Now, Andy is in the Biochemistry Program at Stanford with an interest in tissue development and regeneration. In particular, he hopes to apply chemical methods in the context of tissues like the heart or lungs to characterize the cellular processes involved in regeneration of damaged tissue, as well as identify the molecules and signaling pathways capable of facilitating such regenerative processes.