Assistant Professor
University of Florida
Dr. Ana Maria Porras is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Florida, where she leads the Tissue-Microbe Interactions lab. Her group engineers in vitro models of disease to study human-microbe interactions in the contexts of the microbiome, global health, and infectious disease. Prior to arriving in Florida, Dr. Porras was a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University and an American Heart Association Predoctoral fellow at UW-Madison, where she obtained her Ph.D. She is also the co-founder of the “Latinx in Biomedical Engineering” community, a science artist, and an expert on inclusive multilingual science communication. When she isn’t doing all that, she loves to read, dance, travel, and, above all, eat ice cream.