Ileana Pérez-Rodríguez Joins Penn Arts and Sciences Faculty as Elliman Faculty Fellow

Steven J. Fluharty, Dean of Penn Arts and Sciences, is pleased to announce that Ileana Pérez-Rodríguez has joined Penn as Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Science and Elliman Faculty Fellow. A microbial ecologist who investigates the transfer of energy and matter between hydrothermal environments and microorganisms, Pérez-Rodríguez conducts experiments under different temperature/pressure conditions to evaluate the principles of microbial growth relevant to chemosynthetic metabolisms.

After completing her Ph.D. dissertation defense at Rutgers University in September 2011, Pérez-Rodríguez held two postdoctoral appointments; first as Barbara McClintock Postdoctoral Fellow and as Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations (C-DEBI) Postdoctoral Fellow at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and then as C-DEBI Postdoctoral Scholar-Research Associate at the University of Southern California.

The Elliman Faculty Fellows are being funded by a generous gift from former Penn Arts and Sciences Overseer David D. Elliman, C’73, WG’77, and his wife, Dr. Andrea Branch, through the Bawd Foundation. Mr. Elliman, who has been an advisor to many of the School’s other innovative science initiatives, including the Vagelos Program in Life Sciences and Management, is greatly interested in energy and other areas of scientific research. A former biology major, he is the founding principal of the Elmrock Group of investment companies and is a board member of the Jackson Laboratory and Urban Electric Power, an early-stage energy storage company.