Jeff Hammaker Email & Phone Number

After obtaining my MS in Organic Chemistry, I have worked at four different biotech companies in San Diego. At each company, I was able to adapt quickly to the new culture and become a productive member of the team in a short period of time. In addition to performing a wide range of synthetic organic reactions, I also learned how to diagnose and repair many of the instruments I use on a daily basis. If I am unable to make the repair myself, my diagnosis usually makes it faster and easier for the field service engineer to perform the repair, often by ordering parts to be on-site for the first visit. At every company I've been at, I'm the one that people turned to to help them when they had trouble with an instrument in the lab.At my most recent position (Senomyx), after three years working as a synthetic organic chemist, my supervisor asked me to help set up a new program to find new natural sweeteners and sweet modifiers. We had to buy equipment and design protocols to extract plant samples, fractionate them, reformat the fractions into a format compatible with our high-throughput screening technology, analyze any "hit" fractions to identify the active molecule(s), and isolate the target molecules in sufficient quantities for follow-up studies. With the help of my supervisor and my colleagues, we were able to design a robust process to produce up to 100,000 fractions per year. The program has resulted in the first known all-natural sucrose modifier and a very promising new all-natural sweetener with superior organoleptic properties.When certain hit molecules were not available in sufficient quantity from the natural source, I was able to use synthetic organic chemistry to produce the molecules for follow-up testing. We also used enzymes to perform selective reactions without the need for complex protection/deprotection schemes. Some of these enzyme reactions were scaled up to 100g+ scale.

Listed skills include Drug Discovery, Medicinal Chemistry, Purification, Lc Ms, and 12 others.

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  University Of Arizona

  Chemistry