Academic record · 2008–2025
Research, teaching & mentoring
From 2019 to 2025 I was an Assistant Professor in the Thomas H. Gosnell School of Life Sciences at Rochester Institute of Technology, where I established and ran a research program on plant oxylipin signaling. Before that I spent 2008–2019 at Texas A&M University as a graduate student, postdoctoral researcher and Assistant Research Scientist.
Research program
The Borrego Lab at RIT
I built a 10-person research lab around a SCIEX QTRAP 6500+ to study oxylipins, the fatty acid-derived signals plants use to coordinate defense against microbes and insects. The work combined targeted LC-MS/MS profiling with maize genetics, gene expression and comparative genomics.
Research themes
- Oxylipin and phytohormone signaling in maize wound and defense responses
- Plant–microbe interactions, including a co-mentored student project on maize–bacteria quorum sensing
- Oxylipin biosynthetic gene families in Cannabis sativa
- Mathematical modeling of jasmonic acid biosynthesis (with RIT School of Mathematical Sciences)
- Extraction method development with students, including a hexane–ethyl acetate alternative to dichloromethane for phytohormone and oxylipin extraction (manuscript in preparation)
Mentoring
Training scientists
Former lab members have gone on to Ph.D. programs at Cornell, Penn State, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan, to medical school, and to industry roles including pharmaceutical quality control and consumer-products R&D.
Teaching
Courses taught at RIT
| Course | Title | Years |
|---|---|---|
| BIOL-401 | Biological Separations: Principles and Practices (team-taught) | 2023 |
| BIOL-403 | Fundamentals of Plant Biochemistry and Pathology | 2024 |
| BIOL-216 | Molecular Biology Laboratory | 2023–2025 |
| BIOL-220 | Biology of Fungi and Insects | 2022, 2024 |
| BIOL-389 | Principles of Entomology and Mycology | 2020 |
| BIOL-635 | Bioinformatics Seminar (graduate) | 2022 |
| BIOL-122/125/126 | Introductory Biology Laboratories | 2020–2025 |
At Texas A&M I gave recurring guest lectures on the principles of chromatography and mass spectrometry, with instrument demonstrations, in the graduate course Methods in Molecular Biology of Plant–Microbe Interactions (2015–2018).
Review & recognition
Peer review, service & awards
- Grant review panelist for USDA (2017, 2023) and NSF (2021); ad hoc proposal reviewer for NSF, the Dutch Research Council and the US–Israel Binational Agricultural Research and Development (BARD) Fund
- Primary writer of a funded $982,718 National Science Foundation proposal at Texas A&M (PI: M. Kolomiets)
- Manuscript reviewer for 28 journals, including Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, Plant Physiology and New Phytologist
- Review and topic editor for Frontiers in Plant Science, Frontiers in Genetics and Plants
- Institutional Biosafety Committee member, University of Rochester
- Invited talks including the Western New York Mass Spectrometry Discussion Group and the Gordon Research Conference on Plant Lipids
- Postdoc of the Year (2015) and Graduate Student of the Year (2012), Texas A&M Dept. of Plant Pathology & Microbiology
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Minority Ph.D. (MPHD) Program Scholar (2008–2014)