He is interested in the application of synthetic and medicinal chemistry to questions of biological interest. He joined Vanderbilt in 2008 as the Director of the Vanderbilt Institute of Chemical Biology Chemical Synthesis Core and subsequently joined the group of Professor Stephen Fesik the following year. Alex is involved in a number of medicinal chemistry projects at Vanderbilt, including the fragment-based drug discovery efforts in the Fesik lab, a project to discover inhibitors of the T790M drug resistant mutant of the Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor, and two discovery efforts within Vanderbilt's GI SPORE that are aimed at discovering novel treatments of colon cancer.