Jessica Perea Houston, Ph.D., is a Professor of Chemical & Materials Engineering at New Mexico State University (NMSU) in Las Cruces, NM (2009-present). Jessica received her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Texas A&M University (2005) and was a Director’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory Bioscience Division (2006-2009). She is an alumna of NMSU (’00) and is from Santa Fe, NM. Her research expertise is biomedical instrumentation development with an emphasis on time-resolved flow cytometry systems development, biophotonics and optofluidics. Jessica directs a flow cytometry instrumentation lab at NMSU, has advised over 60 graduate students, undergraduate students and/or postdocs throughout the 13 years she has been at NMSU. Her research is currently supported by a National Institutes of Health R01 grant “Microflow time-resolved flow cytometry for FRET and Fluorescent Protein Development.” Jessica has been active in multidisciplinary research projects that have involved many collaborators, institutions, and international partners. She was a Faculty Fulbright Scholar in Japan for 6 months in 2018 and develops projects that span support from many granting agencies (including NSF CAREER). She became a Scholar of the International Society for the Advancement of Cytometry (ISAC) in 2012 and won Best Paper in the journal Cytometry Part A in 2015. She has also received many awards at NMSU including the Synergy-One award (NMSU College of Engineering) Outstanding Junior Faculty (NMSU Hispanic Faculty and Staff Caucus); the Early Career Award (NMSU Research Council) and the Distinguished Career Award (NMSU Office of the Vice President for Research). Presently Jessica serves as President of ISAC. She is an Associate Editor for the Journal, Cytometry Part A and is a Standing Member of the Cell & Molecular Technologies Study Section for the National Institutes of Health Center for Scientific Review. Jessica is also serving as Co-Chair for the Photonics West BiOS Imaging, Manipulation, and Analysis of Biomolecules, Cells, and Tissues conference in San Francisco, CA.