Santiago Lima

Santiago Lima attended the University of Georgia as an undergrad, where he was also a Division I Swimmer, and where he obtained a doctoral degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 2008. His PhD focused on macromolecular X-ray crystallography and enzymology under the direction of Robbie Phillips. He continued his training as a post-doctoral fellow in Bob Sauer’s lab at MIT, where he discovered that lipopolysaccharides are a co-activator of the bacterial envelope stress response (published in Science, 2013). He then expanded his training by joining the research group of Sarah Spiegel at VCU, who is a world-renowned lipid biologist. In her lab, Santiago developed a passion for the roles that cellular glycosphingolipids play in Cancer. In his lab, Lima uses various molecular approaches and techniques to study these questions including confocal and phase contrast microscopy, CRISPR-CAS9, protein biochemistry, mass spectrometry, cell culture, and cancer animal models. Lima received the Rockstar Fundraising Researcher award from the Massey Cancer Research Center on August 23, 2019.