Ciencia Puerto Rico

José E. Betancourt-Borges was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He received his B.Sc. in Chemistry from University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras (UPR-RP) in 2001 performing research in marine natural products with Prof. Nestor M. Carballeira. In 2003 he began his graduate studies at UPR-RP after spending some time at Pfizer-Barceloneta as summer intern and as laboratory technician at UPR-RP. In 2009 he became visiting scholar for two-months in the Center for Hierarchical Manufacturing at UMass Amherst, in collaboration with the group of Prof. Vincent Rotello. He completed his M.Sc. (2009) and Ph.D. (2011) in Organic and Supramolecular Chemistry under the supervision of Prof. José M. Rivera working with guanine-based scaffolds for the elaboration of self-assembled dendrimers and responsive nanostructures. His academic achievements made him worthy of several scholarships from the NSF-Institute for Functional Nanomaterials, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation-Minority PhD Fellowship, and the Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate, among others. José was a postdoctoral scholar in the group of Prof. Samuel Stupp at Northwestern University. His research interests were focuses on strategies to control the self-assembly of small molecules for applications in biomaterials and energy, supramolecular functional polymers and self regulating catalysis. Currently is a scientist for upstream technologies for Family Care R&D at Procter & Gamble.