Dr. Eva Figuerola is a molecular microbiologist devoted to the study of environmental microorganisms. She earned her Ph.D. in Biological Chemistry in the University of Buenos Aires. Since her postdoc at INGEBI, she began working with soil microbial communities employing high throughput sequencing and bioinformatic analysis. She is currently Adjunct Researcher (II/V) of the National Research Council (CONICET). Her previous work leads to the discovery of some indicator species which can be monitored to track the management history of soils dedicated to agricultural production. Her studies on edaphic microbiome allowed determining that soy monoculture resulted in the homogenization of microbial communities among sites with different soil characteristics. This homogenization was attributed to the loss of endemic species and the simultaneous increase in the number of habitat generalists. Dr. Figuerola is also interested in harnessing environmental bacteria for biotechnology purposes, in this regard, she has a number of publications about microbial communities involved in wastewater treatment. More recently, her research group has begun to explore synthetic communities in order to gain understanding of microbial ecology with the aim to provide biotechnological applications.
