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Ivana Kennedy Parker is an Assistant Professor in the J Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Florida whose research interests include trained immunity, HIV prevention, proteomics, and systems biology.

Early Life and Education
Ivana Parker was raised in North Carolina with her 5 siblings. Her father was one of the first engineering students at the Georgia Institute of Technology and her mother taught her the power of using written words to advocate for herself. She describes that their influences helped her to navigate the engineering space more adeptly.

Parker received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Florida in 2009 and a M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2013. She received her Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2015 where she was co-advised by Manu Platt, Ph.D and Rudy Gleason, Ph.D.

Research and Career
During her doctoral studies at Georgia Tech, Ivana Parker researched pro-atherogenic shear stress, HIV proteins, and antiretroviral therapies on the vasculature using in vivo and in vitro models. While at Georgia Tech, Parker received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and was selected to be a trainee on an NIH Cell and Tissue Engineering Training Grant. She also received a Summer Whitaker Grant to develop artificial aortic valves in Cape Town, South Africa. From 2016 to 2018, Parker was an American Society for Microbiology Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centers for Disease Control within the Division of HIV/AIDS prevention. She evaluated the impact of antiretroviral therapy on current diagnostic assay approaches and identified trends to optimize assay design. Following her postdoctoral fellowship, Parker was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship. As a Fulbright Scholar, he completed a year-long study at the University of Cape Town in South Africa where her work assessed the risk of a commonly used tuberculosis vaccine on HIV susceptibility in infants using proteomics and systems biology. Parker is also the President and a founding member of Wutene, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in Atlanta, Georgia. Wutene was created in 2018 and its mission is to provide affordable health services, education, and training to people living in rural areas or disadvantaged neighborhoods. Parker designed Wutene’s “Before it’s too late” program with Bonheur Dounebaine, MD, MPH to reduce high maternal mortality rate among women in rural areas of Chad.

Additional Awards and Honors
Parker was selected as a 2022 Global Fellow by the UF International Center. As a Global Fellow, she will expand her international research in HIV prevention to Ghana with a goal of developing predictive models for risk factors known to increase HIV transmission in vulnerable populations of women. In 2020, she was featured in ‘100 Inspiring Black Scientists in America’ as a Cell Mentor. In 2017, she was named as a Rising Star in Biomedical Engineering by MIT.

Personal Life
Ivana Parker has three children.