Mendez-Dorantes was one of 60 students nationwide to be awarded a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. He is a PhD Candidate at the City of Hope, where he studies the formation of cancer-associated genetic abnormalities in the laboratory of Dr. Jeremy Stark. Mendez-Dorantes published his first lead author manuscript on genome instability in the April 2018 issue of Genes & Development.