Nancy was born in Bogota, Colombia. She attended to undergraduate school at Universidad de los Andes where she obtained her double major in Physics and Biology. During her undergraduate, she worked with Dr. Manu Forero-Shelton studying mechanical properties of Trypanosoma cruzi and Leishmania major under fluid flow with fluorescence microscopy.
During the summer of 2015, Nancy worked with Dr. Chris Xu in the Applied and Engineering Physics department at Cornell University, where she discovered multiphoton microscopy and its various applications in the biomedical sciences.
In 2016, Nancy worked with Dr. Serge Charpak in the Laboratoire de neurophysiologie et nouvelles microscopies at Universite Paris Descartes, France, where she studied the role of light in cerebral blood flow of rodents, and astrocyte activity in the awake mouse brain with two-photon microscopy
She joined the lab in 2017 as a PhD student in Biomedical Engineering under the supervision of Dr. Chris Schaffer and currently she is working in understanding vascular inflammation and capillary stalling in Alzheimer's disease mouse models.
Outside the lab, Nancy enjoys participating in science communication activities, and she is a board member of Grad SWE (Society of Women Engineers) and GWiS (Graduate Women in Science). She enjoys learning new languages (fluent in Spanish, English and French), cooking, dancing salsa (member of the Palante Salsa group), traveling and taking pictures of animals and nature.
