Bio
Mariana Santos-Rivera was born in the beautiful country of Colombia. She holds a Veterinary Medicine degree from the University of Tolima. In 2010 during her first job at the Scientific Research Center Caucaseco, she worked in preclinical trials to develop malaria vaccines. The malaria research and her ability to communicate in English linked her to her second job, in the Albert and Vivian Puzey Foundation (Quantaspec, Inc.) located in Vermont, USA. There she worked on developing new diagnostic methods for malaria using Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) Spectroscopy. That is where her passion for IR techniques started and motived her to look for her next opportunity in 2013 at the National Coffee Research Center in Colombia. She worked with Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) and learned to perform advanced Chemometric analyses, which in 2017 led her to pursue her current biochemistry doctoral studies at Mississippi State University.
Since 2018 at MSU, Mariana has been testing NIRS and Aquaphotomics to create the biochemical profiles from the animal and plant pathogens: Bovine Herpesvirus type 1, Bovine Respiratory Syncytial Virus, Mannhemia haemolytica, Xanthomonas citri pv. malvacearum, and Rhizoctonia solani. Her ultimate goal is to create the basis for a portable, fast, non-destructive, and accurate diagnosis tool able to reduce the current time and costs required for the detection and identification of pathogens, which are determinant in the infection-related mortality rates and diseases spreading.
Personal websites:
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3356-6276
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariana-santos-rivera-12434a45/
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mariana-Santos-Rivera