Two visiting scholars will be joining Professor Mark Hernandez Group this semester:
Sara Beck. After graduating from CU Environmental Engineering in 2015, Dr. Sara Beck was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study decentralized water reuse in Thailand. From there Sara moved to the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, where she was a Science Fellow engaged in a plethora of microbiology projects. After completing her EAWAG fellowship, Sara rode across Europe with a women’s semi-pro cycling team before returning to Boulder, where she is retooling for her next career stage. For the rest of this academic year, Sara will join Mark Hernandez and Frank Barnes in a DARPA-funded cross-disciplinary research effort to study the effects of weak electromagnetic fields on biological systems (think 5G). Sara is a Colorado native and we are very excited to have her back home………..at least, until her next venture calls.
Eddie Fuques Villalba won a prestigious Latin American scholarship to advance his studies in our Environmental Microbiology laboratories; he was also awarded our CEAS Global Enrichment Scholarship to support his tenure at SEEC this year. Senor Villalba is from the Science Faculty of Evolutionary Genetics in Montevideo, Uruguay and is an expert in viral bioinformatics. Eddie will work closely with environmental Engineering graduate researcher Marina Nieto Caballero to describe the persistence of airborne viruses in high density public spaces. Professor Hernandez and Marina Nieto met Eddie through the MetaSub confederation, which is an international consortium of university researchers that characterize the microbial communities cohabitating subway systems around the world (BTW: Denver is the smallest city in the consortium; check it out at www.metasub.org ). ! Bienvenido Senor Villalba !