La Caixa INPhINIT Phd Fellows joined CBGP

CBGP recently incorporated two Phd students of prestigious La Caixa INPhINIT fellowship of 2017 call to develop projects related to plants-pest’s interactions and computational evolutionary genomics.

CBGP is proud to announce the incorporation of two La Caixa INPhINIT Phd fellows of 2017 call. It is a very prestigious and highly competitive call, which aims at fostering innovative and high-quality research and supporting the best scientific talent by recruiting outstanding students and offering them an attractive and competitive environment for conduction research within centers of excellence Severo Ochoa, which CBGP is a member.

Dairon Ojeda joined Molecular Plants-Pests Interactions group of Dr. Isabel Díaz and title of his project is “Identification of pest control strategies by dissecting molecular plant-pest interactions” . Álvaro Rodríguez del Río joined Dr. Jaime Huerta-Cepas's Computational Evolutionary Genomics group and is working on “Computational approaches in comparative metagenomics”.

Dairon was born in Villa Clara (Cuba) in 1990. Graduated with honours from Biology at the Universidad de la Habana (Cuba) in 2014. Two years of work experience as a professor at Universidad de la Habana (Cuba), involved in teaching of Biostatistics and Experimental Design to undergraduate students. Directed undergraduate thesis evaluation panels and worked as a supervisor for undergraduate students.

He has conducted investigations related to the genetic variation of relevant crops and their resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses. Worked as plant health researcher at the National Centre for Plant Health Research of Cuba. During this period, he supervised the work and data analysis of master students and agricultural engineers. He has participated in international events related to plant health subjects, food safety and sustainable development in several countries. He is author of several articles related with the control and assessment of agroecosystem pests and food safety. He got a renowned international scholarship that allowed him to undergo a Biotechnology Master’s degree at the United Kingdom. Currently, he is a Ph.D. student of the INPhINIT program of La Caixa foundation in “Molecular plants-pests Interactions” group of Dr. Isabel Díaz at the Centro de Biotecnología y Genómica de las Plantas (CBGP, UPM-INIA).

Álvaro was born in Madrid (Spain) in 1994. In 2012 he began a four-year Bachelors in Biotechnology at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), and he specialized in computational biology. Before graduating, Álvaro was involved in different projects at the Centro de Biotecnología y Genómica de las Plantas (CBGP, UPM-INIA), including a virus phylogenetic analysis supervised by Dr. Israel Pagán and a necrotrophic fungal genomics project in Dr. Antonio Molina’s group. In the last period of his Bachelors he moved to Vienna Austria), where he prepared his Bachelors thesis at the chair of Bioinformatics of BOKU University. His project consisted of a comparative genomics study of two beet accessions.

After obtaining his Biotechnology diploma, Álvaro was selected to start an evolutionary biology masters at the University of Groningen (Netherlands). For completing his masters, Álvaro presented two Master theses. For his first project, he worked at Weissing group on theoretical models exploring different aspects of the evolution of sexual cannibalism. Later, he moved to Zaragoza, where he prepared his second thesis, this time on differential gene expression studies on barley, at the genetics department of Estación Experimental Aula Dei. While finishing his masters, Álvaro was awarded a La Caixa INPhINIT fellowship, thanks to which he could return to the CBGP (UPM-INIA) and start a PhD on comparative metagenomics in Jaime Huerta-Cepas's group.