José is a 1st-year Ph.D. Student in the Microbiology & Cell Science program at the University of Florida (UF). He obtained a BSc in Biology from the Industrial University of Santander (Colombia) in 2021. He investigated how bacterial pigments could be useful as sunscreens ingredients by photoprotection and antigenotoxic in vitro approaches. Due to his eagerness to continue researching natural products, he joined Dr. Chevrette's lab at UF. Currently, José is developing a computational pipeline for microbial genome mining to define the boundaries for biosynthetic gene clusters in Streptomyces species, which will be applied to find new active compounds, such as antibiotics, anti-cancer agents, etc. He is from a little town in Colombia (San Vicente de Chucurí), and is accomplishing his dream of pursuing a Ph.D. Program in the U.S. Additionally, José is very grateful to the Project SHORT team as he was a former mentee, which allowed him to have a successful Ph.D. application. Therefore, he wants to support students from underrepresented backgrounds in their graduate applications. In his free time, he likes to play soccer, and cooking different kind of food.