Dr. Alcantar was born in Mexico City, Mexico, in 1970. She received the Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in Chemical Engineering with honors from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1993 and 1994, respectively. She received her Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 2000. She did her postdoctoral research in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at UC Davis and UCSB from 2000 to 2001 in Surface Properties of Thin Films under Confinement. Since 2001 she worked in the Materials Research Institute in UCSB in Surface Characterization and Interfacial Phenomena of Thin Films. From 1999 to 2001 she worked as a consultant engineer in SurForce Corp, Santa Barbara, CA. She joined the University of South Florida at Tampa in August of 2003, where she is currently an Assistant Professor. She is an expert in Surface Force Measurements and FTIR spectroscopy. Her research interests include Interfacial Phenomena and chemical characterization of biomimetic membranes, micellar surfactants, green chemistry materials, nanoparticles and organic/inorganic thin films. She has three graduate students and an undergraduate student working on her laboratory currently. Her graduate student, Jeffy Jimenez, has received the 2005-USF Graduate School Outstanding Thesis Award for her work on amyloid beta intermolecular interactions with interfaces. She has presented numerous invited oral presentations internationally and is a reviewer for Biomacromolecules, Acta Materialia and Langmuir.