Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, Ph.D., is the Executive Director and Chief Scientific Officer of the Stowers Institute. Alejandro joined the Institute in 2011, was named its Scientific Director in 2019, and named Executive Director and Chief Scientific Officer in 2021.

Growing up in Caracas, Venezuela, Sánchez Alvarado moved from Venezuela to the United States to study molecular biology and chemistry at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and then at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, where he earned his Ph.D. in pharmacology and cell biophysics. In 1994, he joined the laboratory of Donald D. Brown, M.D., in the department of embryology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington as a postdoctoral fellow. In 1995, he was appointed to the position of staff associate. It was during this period that Sánchez Alvarado developed his abiding interest in explaining the processes of regeneration.

Not satisfied with the available research organisms, he went looking for a better one, subsequently setting his sights on the planarian. On a trip to Barcelona with his first postdoctoral researcher, Phil Newmark, Ph.D., they collected a unique strain of the planaria Schmidtea mediterranea in an abandoned fountain. Sánchez Alvarado was able to subsequently establish the planaria as a modern research animal, studied by multiple other investigators. The Planarian Core in the Reptile and Aquatics Facility at the Stowers Institute now furnishes planaria to researchers and educators across the globe.

From 2002 to 2011, Sánchez Alvarado was a faculty member in the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the University of Utah School of Medicine. In 2005, he was named an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). Sánchez Alvarado is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a lifetime fellow for the American Association for the advancement of Science (AAAS). He is a recipient of the Priscilla Wood Neaves Endowed Chair in the Biomedical Sciences.

Sánchez Alvarado speaks at conferences and seminars worldwide and serves on multiple local, regional and national boards, including the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Linda Hall Library and KCUR in Kansas City.