Graduate Assistant
University of Florida
Mai Mehanna was born in 1988 in Cairo, Egypt. She received her bachelor’s degree in pharmaceutical sciences in 2010 from Misr International University, Egypt. She earned the American Board Certification in Pharmacotherapy in 2011. Mai worked as a clinical research associate at the Children’s Cancer Hospital from 2012 to 2015. Thereafter, she received a Fulbright scholarship to pursue her master’s degree in Pharmacotherapy and Translational Research which she earned in May 2017 from the University of Florida. There, she studied the field of pharmacogenomics and personalized medicine, and her research work was focused on the role of plasma renin activity biomarker in personalizing antihypertensive drug therapy. In May 2018, she received a graduate assistantship from the University of Florida to pursue her PhD in pharmacogenomics and precision medicine. During her time as a PhD student, Mai studied the metabolomic underpinnings of the factors contributing to variability in BP responses to antihypertensive drugs in European and African American hypertensive patients under the supervision of her mentor Dr. Rhonda Cooper-DeHoff. She received her PhD degree in Clinical Pharmaceutical Sciences in December 2022. During her training at the University of Florida, Mai had five peer-reviewed manuscripts as a first author and presented numerous abstracts at national research conferences. Her research was also selected for several awards.