Dr.  Eliana Valenzuela-Andrade

Dr. Eliana Valenzuela-Andrade is a faculty member at the Computer Sciences Department at UPRA. She holds a doctoral degree in Computing, Information Sciences, and Engineering, a Master's in Engineering Management Systems from the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez Campus, and a BS in Industrial Engineering from the Universidad de Los Andes, in Bogotá, Colombia. 

She has nearly fifteen years of teaching experience and ten years of research experience. The research areas of Dr. Valenzuela-Andrade are Database Management Systems, Datamining, Educational Robotics, Swarm Robotics, and Outreach Strategies for STEM careers, among others. 

In the past ten years, she has been interested in innovative tools to motivate young people to explore CS topics before and during college and encourage them to continue a career in this discipline. She had participated in projects of this type with ISMuL and LASED at UPR-Arecibo at pre-college (4-12) and undergraduate level. Some of the tools she has used are robotics (using Lego Mindstorms®, TETRIX®, and VEX®), computing without computers, Scratch, SNAP Alice 3, among others. 

During the last five years, she has been part of the conference organizing committees such as the TAPIA Conference, Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, Great Minds in STEM, and others. She has also led the organization of conferences for Puerto Rico and the Caribbean such as CCWIC (sponsored by ACM) and Explore CRC (sponsored by Google).

She is part of Latinas in Computing, CCCE, FemProf, and CAHSI. She enjoys learning about computing relevant topics such as cyber-security, internet governance, network communications, behind others.