Dr. Catia S. Silva is an Instructional Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida. She specializes in machine learning, artificial intelligence, data analytics, personalized learning, workforce development, and experiential education. Dr. Silva teaches courses in data science and AI, actively supporting UF’s university-wide initiative to integrate AI across disciplines. She currently serves as the Program Coordinator for both the Master of Science in Applied Data Science and the Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence Systems.

Dr. Silva is also a GitHub Campus Advisor In this role, she co-developed training programs to help faculty across campus incorporate Git and GitHub Classroom into their teaching, and assists students in effectively managing repositories and collaborative projects using Git.

With a truly interdisciplinary education and academic path, Dr. Silva’s background bridges applied mathematics, biomedical engineering, electrical and computer engineering, and artificial intelligence. She earned her B.S. in Applied Mathematics in 2010 and her M.S. in Biomedical Engineering in 2012 from the University of Porto, where her thesis applied data science and machine learning to feature extraction and classification of dermoscopic images. During this time, she also participated in research groups, conferences, and competitions focused on image processing, including retinal vessel segmentation, dermoscopic image classification, and fingerprint detection.

After completing her master’s degree, she worked as a research scientist at INESC TEC in Portugal, within the Power and Energy Systems Unit. There, she contributed to the foundational development of machine learning models for wind and solar power forecasting and collaborated internationally on projects with institutions such as the Argonne National Laboratory.

Dr. Silva moved to Gainesville in 2013 and earned her Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Florida in 2018, conducting research in the Computational NeuralEngineering Laboratory (CNEL) under the mentorship of Distinguished Professor Dr. José C. Príncipe. Her doctoral research focused on developing systems to quantify spatiotemporal neural activity.

Before returning to UF as a faculty member in Fall 2019, Dr. Silva worked as a research scientist at Aventusoft, a startup in South Florida, where she developed an automatic cardiovascular assessment system.

Since joining the faculty, Dr. Silva has been recognized with multiple teaching excellence awards for her innovative, student-centered approach to education and her commitment to preparing students for real-world challenges.