Eva Maria Gomez Alvarez

I was born in L’Eliana (Valencia, Spain), the 30th of January of 1996. I did the BSc in Biotechnology at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (2014-2018) and my MSc in Biotechnology and agroforestry in Polytechnic University of Madrid (2018-2019), obtaining a scholarship to perform the master thesis, that I passed with honors. During my bachelor's degree, I was part of the iGEM contest in Boston as a member of my university team with the project ‘ChatterPlant’ (Valencia UPV, 2017). In the summer of 2018, I received an ERASMUS+ grant to do an internship in the Department of Plant Sciences of the University of Oxford, with Mark Fricker.  I joined the PlantLab in October of 2019 as a Ph.D. student in the program of Agrobiodiversity of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna.

I am studying the tolerance mechanisms of wild and cultivated varieties of rice and barley to hypoxic stress. I focus not only on the genetic basis of the tolerance to the above-mentioned stress but also on the role that the microbiome plays on it. For this reason, I am learning about plant physiology, genetics and bioinformatics to analyze phenotypes, genomics and metagenomics data.