Disruptive Technologies for Combating Emerging Disease: From Bath Salts to Disease Elimination

 Professor Tobin J. Dickerson is a chemical biologist whose research program targets the interface between chemical biology, immunology, and medicine.  He received his B.S. in chemistry with high honors in 1999 from the University of Virginia, where he was named an Echols Scholar, Alumni Scholar, Robert C. Byrd Scholar, and William Folkes Scholar.  He then studied chemical biology at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and completed his Ph.D. in 2004 examining the chemical reactivity of drugs of abuse.  During this time, Dr. Dickerson received numerous awards for his research including a National Institutes of Health predoctoral fellowship, an Eli Lilly Graduate Fellowship in Organic Chemistry, and the Norton B. Gilula Graduate Student Fellowship.  In 2005, Dr. Dickerson joined the Department of Chemistry at TSRI as an Assistant Professor and also was a founding member of the Worm Institute of Research and Medicine (WIRM) at TSRI, which considers those diseases that disproportionately afflict the world’s poorest populations.  In 2012, Dr. Dickerson was promoted to Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at TSRI.

The research interests of the Dickerson laboratory are focused on the prediction and detection of emerging disease.  In particular, the Dickerson laboratory has reported on the application of metabolomics to neglected tropical disease diagnostics, as well as provided some of the first behavioral data characterizing the emerging class of drugs of abuse colloquially termed “bath salts”.  To date, Dr. Dickerson has published greater than 70 peer-reviewed scientific articles and his research has been highlighted by a number of public media outlets including The Economist, U.S. News and World Reports, Scientific American, Science, Nature, and BBC News.