Students
Tori Strong, B.S.
Ph.D.
Advisor: Scott R. Gilbertson, Ph.D.
Tori Strong was born and raised in Houston, TX. He received is BA in Biochemistry from Baylor University in 1999. He then began to work as technician in Dr. Kevin Pinney's laboratory doing organic synthetic chemistry, eventually leading to join the MS program in chemistry at Baylor University. Not being satisfied with just doing synthetic chemistry switched gears to joining the PhD program in Pharmacology under the division of Chemical Biology. This new program allows him to fuse his knowledge of Chemistry with his new training in Pharmacology to cultivate his career in Drug Design. Currently his research involves total synthesis of both the natural product and a library of derivatives of Salvinorin A, a non-nitrogenous alkaloid, a hallucinogen and more importantly an efficacious selective kappa opioid agonist. The synthesis of these ligands will be both tested to see the therapeutic effect of conferring analgesia in the disease model of pancreatitis along with drug discrimination against know hallucinogens. Tori is an inaugural Keck Fellow for the Keck Center Pharmacoinformatics Training Program of the Gulf Coast Consortia, sponsored by the NIH. In his spare time enjoys music and spending time with family.
Email: tmstrong@utmb.edu