Environmental Microbiology, Biotechnology, Wastewater Processing, Clinical Microbiology

As part of the UW-Madison graduate program, and as a personal choice during my Ph.D. formation, I recruited, mentored, and trained more than a dozen undergraduate students over five years. To engage students in the hard, sometimes messy work of learning within a laboratory setup, I designed a mentoring-mentee statement to emphasize the application of knowledge to address persistent and emerging problems in environmental microbiology. In particular, I assisted my students over all stages of their formation, from learning basic chemistry concepts, to advance molecular biology techniques and genome-scale modeling of microorganisms. These efforts translated into a creative and motivating environment, where they felt empowered to create their projects while assisting me to reach my goal of obtaining my doctorate. The fact that the majority of them decided to continue working in the lab for a longer time than what it was originally required, validated this mentoring philosophy. My relationship with these students generated a positive impact on their development, recognized several times by the Undergraduate Research Scholar (URS) program, a high-impact practice at UW-Madison, as well as by the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning.

TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER: In November 2016, in conjunction with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), I filed a patent for quantification using DNA amplicon sequencing (QUDAS™). This technology couples 16S rDNA amplicon sequencing with synthetic DNA constructs to estimate the concentration of all microorganisms present in a sample (i.e., number of cells/volume). Current methods are limited to one or a few pathogens per assay, and 16S amplicon sequencing can only report relative abundances. By contrast, QUDAS can identify not only common but also, unexpected pathogenic microorganisms, which are usually disregarded with the current detection techniques. In November 2017, this innovation was converted to a Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) application (PCT US2017/061469), where several claims have already been accepted, thus I foresee its use in the near future.