Mariana has a Ph.D. in Plant Biotechnology from the State University of the North Fluminense Darcy Ribeiro (UENF). During her Ph.D., she investigated the molecular bases that modulate the efficiency of the association between plants and beneficial bacteria and developed a pipeline combining proteomic analysis and large-scale reverse genetics to prospect new genes and metabolic pathways associated with bacterial survival under challenging environments. She worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Genomics for Climate Change Research Center (GCCRC), at University of Campinas (Unicamp), coordinating the creation of collections of microorganisms, in which she used disruptive methodologies for the isolation and identification of bacteria and fungi associated with plants.
