Dr. Penuela is an Associate Professor with tenure at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. Silvia is originally from Bogota, Colombia, where she did her B.Sc. in Microbiology at the University of Los Andes. She then moved to the United States and did her Ph.D. in Plant Pathology and Molecular Genetics at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and a first postdoc at the USRA-ARS laboratories in St. Paul, Minnesota. She then moved to Canada and did a second postdoc with Dr. Dale Laird at the University of Western Ontario characterizing the novel family of pannexin proteins and their function in health and disease. In July 2014, she started a tenure-track faculty position at Western University in the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology. Her research team is currently funded by a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Project grant, NSERC Discovery Grant, Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI), and a Cancer Research Society grant. She serves in several grant panels including CIHR (member of the college of reviewers and scientific officer) and is the associate editor of two cell biology journals. Her research program has continued the seminal work done in pannexins in normal tissues including skin homeostasis and fat accumulation in obesity, as well as malignant transformation in different cancers such as melanoma and glioblastoma.