Associate Professor, Chemistry and Biochemistry
Dr. Sanchez was born and raised in Northern California. She attended Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA where she obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Chemistry and became an IM dodgeball champion. Laura decided to pursue a Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of California, Santa Cruz after a NSF Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Prof. Phil Crews lab. She returned to UCSC to work for Prof. Roger Linington where her graduate studies encompassed medicinal chemistry and natural products drug discovery. She then joined join Prof. Pieter Dorrestein’s lab at UC San Diego as an NIH IRACDA Fellow. Dr. Sanchez started her independent lab in the Fall of 2015 at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Department of Pharmaceutical sciences. The lab relocated to the University of California, Santa Cruz Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in January 2021. Her team specializes in using and adapting imaging mass spectrometry and tandem mass spectrometry for small molecule analyses in complex systems. She was a K12 BIRCWH Scholar (2016-2017) which supported the translation of the techniques to women’s health. She was the Rising Star in the Life Sciences in 2019 at UIC, 2022 ACS Infectious Diseases/ACS Division of Biological Chemistry Young Investigator awardee, and the 2022 American Society for Pharmacognosy Matt Suffness Young Investigator awardee.