Welcome to my ePortfolio

Dr. Umesh Bhattarai, M.Sc., Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Organic Chemistry and Drug Development researcher, avid reader, food enthusiasts,life-long learner

About Me

I have been teaching at Adams State since the fall of 2018. Originally from Nepal, I moved from Nepal to the USA in 2013 as a graduate student after completing my M.Sc. and working as a lecturer of Chemistry in Nepal. Being from a remote village in a mountainous country Nepal, it was hard to get a quality education and pursue the dream of becoming a scientist. Because of that, I moved far from my home at a very young age and struggled a lot to adjust to a new place/environment in my high school. In addition, being from a non-English-speaking community, I faced difficulty learning English at first. However, by the end of high school, I became good in both English and Science. After getting my undergraduate degree in Chemistry, I got my M. Sc. in Organic Chemistry from Tribhuvan University, Nepal. After teaching Chemistry for a few years in Nepal, I moved to the University of New Mexico for my Ph.D. in Chemistry. To fulfill my dream to be a professor, I joined Adams State after completing the Ph.D.

What I do now

Drug development is my passion. During my graduate school, I was making molecules that can target a type of regulatory non-coding (nc) RNAs responsible for the regulation of cancer-causing genes. While making self-designed molecules, I realized that our nature has a huge collection of molecules and we might get some bioactive molecules targeting our biomolecule of interest. So, now I am focusing on finding out chemicals from plants, create a library of such chemicals, and screen against the ncRNAs of our interest. As we know the majority of FDA-approved drugs are coming from the plant source, we are hopeful to find out some molecule with therapeutic potential targeting our biomolecule of interest. A brief description of what I do know is given below,

Biomedical data mining and biomarker detection

Natural Product Chemistry and bioactive molecule identification

Target validation and therapeutic application

Courses I teach

Introductory Chemistry (Chem 105)

Intro to General Chemistry (Chem 111)

Intro to organic and biological Chemistry (Chem 112)

General Chemistry (Chem 131)

Organic Chemistry I (Chem 321)

Organic Chemistry II (Chem 322)

Medicinal Chemistry (Chem 479)