La Profe Ana Maria Porras is a biomedical engineering professor, communicator, and science artist. She leads the Tissue-Microbe Interactions lab at the University of Florida. Her group engineers models of disease to study human-microbe interactions in the context of the human gut microbiome, tropical infectious diseases, and global health. They also develop bilingual and artistic strategies to engage communities locally and globally. Over the past 5 years, Dr. Porras has been teaching microbiology using her own crocheted art. She is also the co-founder and Senior Advisor of the Latinx in Biomedical Engineering community. She was selected as an IF/THEN AAAS Ambassador for girls and women in STEM and was honored with a statue at the Smithsonian Institution within that program. Prior to arriving in Florida, Prof. Porras was a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University. She holds a B.S. in biomedical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, and a Masters and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, where she was also an American Heart Association Predoctoral Fellow. She loves to read, dance, travel, craft, swim, and, above all, eat ice cream.