Rate My Professor Beatriz Peñalver Bernabé

Beatriz Peñalver Bernabé is an Assistant Professor in the Richard and Loan Hill Department of Biomedical Engineering within the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Chicago. She earned her Ph.D. in Chemical and Biological Engineering from Northwestern University in 2014, M.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2004, and B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Murcia, Spain in 2000. Her career spans industry and academia, including roles as Process Engineer at GE Plastics (2000-2002), Lead Research and Development Process Engineer at SABIC Innovative Plastics (2004-2008), and postdoctoral positions at Northwestern University (2015-2016), as Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago and University of California San Diego (2016-2019), and Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Illinois Chicago (2016-2019). She joined the University of Illinois Chicago as Assistant Professor of Bioengineering in 2019 and holds a courtesy appointment as Assistant Professor of Bioengineering in Urology in the College of Medicine since 2020.

Dr. Peñalver Bernabé's research employs systems biology, computational modeling, and statistical tools to explore dynamic processes in women's health, focusing on the interactions between the maternal microbiome, metabolism, immune responses, and perinatal mental health disorders such as depression. Her NIH-funded work addresses health equity, particularly perinatal depression in women of color, ovarian biology, and translational applications through interdisciplinary collaborations in engineering, medicine, and public health. She directs the Bea Lab and has received the Health Equity Pilot Project Faculty Development Career Award in 2022 for her project on the gut microbiome's role in perinatal depression, an NIH grant to investigate the pathobiology of perinatal depression, and the Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellowship (2016-2019). Key publications include "Evidence for chromosome 2p16.3 polycystic ovary syndrome susceptibility locus in affected women of European ancestry" (Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, 2013), "State–time spectrum of signal transduction logic models" (Physical Biology, 2012), "Promoting extracellular matrix remodeling via ascorbic acid enhances the survival of primary ovarian follicles encapsulated in alginate hydrogels" (Biotechnology and Bioengineering, 2014), "Interactions between perceived stress and microbial-host immune response gene expression is associated with depressive symptoms during pregnancy" (Translational Psychiatry, 2023), and "Inflammatory dietary potential is associated with vitamin depletion and postpartum depressive symptoms" (Scientific Reports, 2023). Her contributions have advanced understanding of microbiome-brain axes and garnered hundreds of citations, influencing perinatal health research.