Osvaldo was born in Salamanca, Guanajuato (Mexico) and raised in Sacramento, California. He attended Sacramento City College for 6 years then transferred to UCLA in 2006 to pursue a career in medicine. However, working as an undergraduate at the laboratories of Prof. Kendall N. Houk inspired him to change career path to organic chemistry.

 

He graduated in 2009 with B.S. and M.S. degrees in chemistry from UCLA and moved back to northern California to enroll in graduate studies at UC Davis. He completed his PhD in 2012 under the guidance of Prof. Dean J. Tantillo; his thesis was focused on the use of computational electronic structure methods to reveal mechanisms of catalytic processes.

​

He then moved across the country to work with Prof. Marisa C. Kozlowski at the University of Pennsylvania where he used computational and experimental tools to study transition-metal catalyzed processes. In his free time, he likes to listen to 90s rap and enjoy time with his two daughters and wife.

​

In 2016, he joined the faculty of the University of Maryland-College Park as an Assistant Professor and promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. In 2021, he was appointed Associate Professor at Texas A&M University and promoted to Full Professor effective September 1, 2024. In January 1, 2025, Prof. Gutierrez was appointed Professor in the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department and as the inaugural Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC) Hispanic Serving Institution (HIS) STEM Faculty Director at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

 

He is recipient of the NSF CAREER Award (2018), the NIH NIGMS Maximizing Investigator's Research Award (2020), and was recently named as part of the C&EN Talented 12 (2020) and Camille Dreyfus Teacher Scholar.