The Outstanding Graduate honor is bestowed upon students in good standing who have unique accomplishments that show excellence, perseverance, and impact. The awardee, selected by the university from the College of Engineering and Computing, will be honored at the upcoming commencement ceremony.
All her life, Beatriz Herrera was surrounded by the medical field and stories from her mother, who was a family doctor and brought Beatriz along with her while she worked . These experiences sparked an interest in medicine and biology for Beatriz from a young age, which motivated her to pursue them further in graduate school, alongside physics and neuroscience.
Prior to joining the Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME), Beatriz built a strong background in computational neuroscience as an undergraduate student at the University of Havana, where she studied and created simulations of small neuronal networks in collaboration with the Cuban Neuroscience Center, through which she met Jorge Riera, Ph.D., Interim Chair and associate professor of the BME department.
As a culmination of her undergraduate work, she completed her dissertation “Braess’s Paradox in Spiking Neuronal Networks,” in which she implemented and simulated two models of spiking neuronal networks.
Upon getting in touch with Dr. Riera and completing her undergraduate studies at the University of Havana, Beatriz began expanding her work in computational neuroscience into a career in biomedical engineering, which led her to join the Department of Biomedical Engineering as a Ph.D. student in Fall 2018.
Here, she worked alongside Dr. Riera, her primary advisor, and co-supervisor Jeffrey Schall, Ph.D., in the Neuronal Mass Dynamics Laboratory, where she published four first-author publications and presented at several national and international conferences.
Beatriz has received numerous awards in recognition of her work at FIU, including the UGS Graduate Publication Funds Grant, two SfN Trainee Professional Development Awards, the 2023 Allen Institute Modeling Software Workshop Travel Grant, Cosyne New Attendees Travel Grant, UGS Provost Award for Outstanding Paper or Manuscript (STEM), and three 1st Place Poster Presentation Awards from FIU and the University of Miami.
Beatriz currently works as a research scientist at the Allen Institute in Seattle, Washington, where she is continuing her research in computational neuroscience, biophysics and cortical microcircuit models of various areas of the brain, with a focus on the visual cortex. In the future, she plans to continue studying multiscale brain modeling and non-invasive imaging for neurological disorders.