Lorenzo Vega-Montoto, PhD

Lorenzo Vega-Montoto is currently a Research Instructor at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee. He is a member of the division of Nephrology as part of Dr. Vanacore’s Research Lab since January 2012. He performed his undergraduate studies in University of Havana, Cuba where he got a B. Sc. with Honors in Chemistry. Shortly after that, he received an scholarship from Dalhousie University (N.S., Canada) to do his M.Sc. and Ph.D. under the supervision of Dr. Peter D. Wentzell on the field of chemometrics. He pursued an NIH funded post-doctoral fellowship with Dr. Cifford Spiegelman at Texas A&M University where his expertise in Analytical Chemistry, chemometrics, bioinformatics and proteomics were used and refined in a multi-institutions endeavor to improve the repeatability and reproducibility of proteomics experiments. Dr. Daniel Liebler recruited him to Vanderbilt after the project was over, and he worked until 2012 with his group developing models to automatically detect proteomics instrument malfunctions and improve proteomics outcomes. His main goal in Dr Vanacore’s Lab is to develop, optimize and apply LC-MS/MS and bioinformatic methods for finding, identifying and characterizing the different types of cross-links in collagen IV networks. He is also responsible for developing proteomics and bioinformatics methods to study diabetic nephropathy, a project that is done in collaboration with Dr. Billy Hudson. To answer these questions, Lorenzo uses analytical and biochemical techniques including liquid chromatography (classical, HPLC and UPLC), mass spectrometry (MS), affinity chromatography in combination with bioinformatics approaches such as MS/MS data analysis for shotgun proteomics (SEQUEST, Mascot, X!Tandem, Myrimatch, IDPicker, Peptide and Protein Prophet, etc.), analysis of  multiple reaction monitoring techniques (MRM), quantitation based on labeled and label-free proteomics experiments (SKYLINE).