Director, Center for Collaborative Research in Health Disparities, Professor of Pharmacology,
Site Lead
University of Puerto Rico, Medical Sciences Campus
Dr. Emma Fernández-Repollet is the Executive Director and Principal Investigator of the Center for Collaborative Research in Health Disparities at the University of Puerto Rico Medical Sciences Campus. Currently, grant funds to the Center, exceed $19 million for the next five years and are directed toward development of biomedical research addressing health disparities in Puerto Rico. Dr. Fernández-Repollet served as Vice President for Research and Technology at the University of Puerto Rico for seven years. In this role, she was responsible for oversight and development of research for the UPR, including pre-award management of grants and contracts (average annual funding ~$90 million); research policies and procedures (including federal compliance areas), intellectual property and technology transfer; the UPR Centennial Fund Initiative, a government-funded program designed to support the development of research infrastructure, the recruitment of competitive investigators; the conceptualization of a technology transfer unit; and oversight of research centers and institutes across the eleven campuses. In 2016, she founded the BioMed Innovation Laboratory as a site to foster creativity among High School and Undergraduate students. She is a co-inventor of two patents in the area of flow cytometry which resulted in commercial products (i.e. Broad Spectrum Alignment Standard © and Certified Blank Bead©) that were used worldwide to standardize flow cytometers and quantitate clinical research data. Dr. Fernández-Repollet was a member the Board of Directors of the Puerto Rico Science, Technology and Research Trust and the Alliance for the Economic Development of Puerto Rico. Currently, she is President of the National RCMI Program Directors Association, Chair of the Steering Committee of the RCMI Translational Research Network (RTRN), Secretary of the Board of Directors of the Center for Quantitative Cytometry and member of the RCMI Advisory Committees of Meharry Medical College, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Florida International University and University of California Riverside School of Medicine.