Isis Y. Narvaez-Bandera earned her bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering in 2007 from the Universidad del Atlntico, Colombia. At the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagez Campus (UPRM), she earned her master’s degree in industrial engineering in 2017 and is a current PhD candidate in bioengineering–bioinformatics and a member of the Applied Optimization Group. She has a broad range of experience in data preprocessing, segmentation, transformation, integration, and visualization. Her doctoral work addresses the joint analysis of tropical viral infections and neurodegenerative diseases with a mathematical optimization point of view. She has focused on the coding and automation of the Multiple Criteria Optimization (MCO) method, a gene selection deterministic approach developed by her research group. Using the MCO tool, she conducted the joint analysis of Parkinson’s disease with Dengue virus, West Nile virus, and Hepatitis C. Her work has been published in the journal PLOS ONE, and she has three additional peer-reviewed articles in the final stages of publication. As a professor, Narvaez-Bandera hopes to serve as a role model for students from underrepresented minority groups in STEM. Her plan is to educate, challenge, and motivate students inside and outside of the classroom and show them the endless possibilities of pursuing an engineering career.

Research Interests

Bioinformatics