Associate Professor and Research Scientist at the Universidad Tecnica del Norte (UTN), Faculty of Engineering in Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Ibarra, Ecuador. She is Director of the Biofood and Nutraceutics Research and Development Group and Responsible of the R&D Microbial Biotechnology Laboratory-BIOGEM, where she put the basis of several research projects exploring the microbiota associated to native fruits of Ecuadorian Amazon.
She holds a Ph.D. in Biology/ Genetics from the University of Bucharest, Department of Genetics.
Her first postdoc in Transgenesis and Plant Molecular Biology was done at the Department of Biology at Purdue University (Fulbright Scholarship) in the USA. Her second postdoc in Transcriptomics was at the Food Safety Department of the Joint Research Centre-European Commission in Belgium (2012). Through the PROMETEO Project, funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology for Superior Education (SENESCYT)-Ecuador she joined the UTN in 2014. She has identified several native lactic acid bacteria with antimicrobial and probiotic properties. From 2022 she is affiliated at the University of Agronomic Sciences and Veterinary Medicine of Bucharest as associate professor habilitated to conduct doctoral thesis in the field of Engineering and Management of Plant and Animal Resources –Biotechnology Field.