Cristina Rodríguez PhD

Strategy and operating model. Define the service portfolio, pricing, capacity and investment priorities of UBC's preclinical PET, SPECT and CT core, built around a VECTor/CT system that acquires all three modalities simultaneously, serving 17+ research groups and 25 active projects. Own the budget of a fully cost-recovered facility; rebuilt its financial and activity reporting into a single ledger and benchmarked its rate card against comparable Canadian facilities.

Governance and compliance. Accountable for radiation-safety and animal-ethics compliance across every study; report to institutional and scientific oversight including TRIUMF's Life Sciences committee; manage the instrument lifecycle, QC and calibration programmes, service contracts and SOPs.

Partnerships and scientific leadership. Build the relationships that sustain the facility with investigators, departments and partner institutions; negotiate scope and resources for multi-year studies; set the quantification methodology behind 63 facility publications since 2014.

People and capacity building. Supervise and train technical staff, students and users; lead the annual imaging workshops; advised another UBC lab through its first year of a new microCT facility; lead trainer for optical imaging across Pharmaceutical Sciences labs.

Operational technology. Designed and built LabTools, the software that replaced the facility's manual processes for SOPs, isotope inventory, animal transfers and figures, now shared with other labs.

Helped build and expand UBC's preclinical PET, SPECT and CT platforms with investigators across UBC, TRIUMF and local biotech. Instrument maintenance, workflow optimization, user training, study design and scientific reporting.

Designated trainer and technical resource for the Lago X optical imager: fluorescence and bioluminescence study design, standardized acquisition and analysis protocols, troubleshooting across labs.

Advised a UBC lab establishing a new MILabs microCT facility through its first year: site setup, workflow and operational practice.

Designed, synthesized and evaluated small-molecule radiotracers for theranostic applications in Alzheimer's disease: live-cell assays, protein binding and aggregation, enzyme inhibition, cytotoxicity and structure-based design.

Homology modelling, virtual screening, docking and binding free-energy prediction to identify novel agonists of the Cannabinoid Receptor 2.

Full-time teaching appointment (undergraduate lectures and laboratory courses) held throughout the doctorate, which was carried out in the UAB Department of Chemistry with collaborations and research stays at ICMAB-CSIC and IQS Barcelona.

Characterization of amyloid-β, amylin and transthyretin and their interactions with small-molecule drug leads.

Synthetic strategies for incorporating iodine-123 into small molecules for in vivo imaging; synthesis and characterization of metal complexes.

Analytical methods for drugs, biogas, polymers and fragrances by HPLC, GC and GC/MS.

Unified financial and activity reporting with calendar- and fiscal-year views, and pricing benchmarked against comparable Canadian facilities.

Built the QC, calibration and cross-calibration programmes, training and documentation that make MIRF's PET, SPECT and CT results consistent from study to study and from user to user, so investigators can publish quantitative data from the facility with confidence.

Carried that operating model to two other UBC laboratories: an optical imaging platform (fluorescence and bioluminescence, in vivo and ex vivo) where I became lead trainer, and a new microCT facility (below 20 µm resolution, for ex vivo skull and dental specimens and in vivo mice) which I advised through its first year.

Replaced folders of Word files, spreadsheets and email threads with purpose-built tools for SOPs, isotope inventory, animal transfers and figures; now shared openly with academic labs.

Drug-like molecules as candidate radiotracers for Alzheimer's disease: target validation, metal-protein titrations, circular dichroism and fluorescence assays, chemoinformatics pipelines for library triage.