Dr. Edgar Arriaga is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry. After earning a “Licenciatura” (B.Sc.) degree at the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala in 1985, Edgar moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, where he completed a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Dalhousie University in 1990. After two postdoctoral appointments, one at the University of Kansas Medical Center focused on electrophysiology and one at the University of Alberta focused on microanalytical chemistry, he joined the faculty of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Minnesota in 1998. 

Dr. Arriaga’s research applies chemical and engineering principles to design novel strategies to investigate the complexity of biological systems. These strategies address one of the most critical challenges in modern biomedical, pharmacological, and environmental research: the highly heterogeneous nature of cellular architecture, biological function, and responses to chemical treatments. The strategies include high-throughput measurements of individual organelles, multi-parametric analysis of single cells, subcellular- and tissue-specific proteomic and lipidomic analyses, cell engineering, and redox biology, which utilize capillary electrophoresis, HPLC-MS, mass cytometry, molecular biology, and biochemistry resources. Our current projects focus on applications in aging and related diseases, metabolic dysfunction, drug response, and cancer.