María Lorena Mejía Castañeda

Lorena Mejía is a Biotechnologist and has a Master's degree in Microbiology from the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ, Ecuador) and a Doctor in Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology from the Universitat de València (Spain). As part of the USFQ Institute of Microbiology, she is Coordinator of the Food Microbiology Laboratory (a service laboratory that mainly helps solve contamination problems in products and identify microorganisms through Molecular Biology). She is also a full-time professor and researcher. He teaches theory and laboratory classes to undergraduate students of General Microbiology, Food Microbiology and Pathogen Microbiology; In postgraduate studies he teaches Diagnostic Laboratory and practical Rotation classes. He has supervised undergraduate and master's theses, mainly on the detection of enteric viruses and food pathogens. His main interest is the study of foodborne pathogens and the genomic epidemiology of bacteria, as well as genetic recombination analysis.