Antonio Tinoco Valencia was born in Irapuato, Guanajuato, México, and as a young child immigrated with his family to the United States, and was raised in the San Gabriel Valley region of Los Angeles. He graduated from California State University, Los Angeles in 2015 cum laude with departmental honors in chemistry. He pursued graduate studies as a National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Rochester, receiving his PhD in 2020. His graduate work with Prof. Rudi Fasan focused on the development of asymmetric biocatalytic transformations and the engineering of hemoproteins as biocatalysts for enantioselective carbene transfer reactions. From 2020–2025, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University in the research group of Prof. Emily P. Balskus. His research in the Balskus lab focused on discovering and characterizing the bacterial enzymes for the human gut microbial conversion of cholesterol to coprostanol, and creating chemical biology tools for manipulating bacterial cholesterol metabolism in the human gut microbiome. He also received training in environmental microbiology and microbial ecology as a member of the Microbial Diversity Summer Course at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole during the summer of 2022, where he focused on the isolation, characterization, and laboratory evolution of marine Vibrio bacteriophages. Antonio joined the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in 2025, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry.