I am a PhD student in Plant Breeding for Vertical Farming, which I believe will be the future of agriculture in our cities. My project, SKY HIGH: Vertical farming, a revolution in plant production, intends to optimize and implement Vertical Farming in urban areas in the incoming years. My mission is to help in the development of new lettuce (Lactuca Sativa) varieties which make the most out this new agricultural settings.

Visiting period to Robertson McClung's Lab in Dartmouth College.

Member of the Light Regulation of Plant Development research group lead by Prof. Jaume Martínez-García in CRAG. My goal was to enhance the understanding of plant responses to vegetation proximity, as light-limiting conditions in agricultural settings. I performed comparative analysis between shade-avoider plants such as Arabidopsis thaliana and shade-tolerant plants such as Cardamine hirsuta. Ultimately, these studies intend to understand how to optimize crops to maximize light-absortion under real field conditions. Concretely, I did extensive research about the common elements between the shade-avoiding syndrom (SAS) and the Dark-induced Senescence (DIS) response that culminated in my Master Thesis defense.

Internship in the Pharmacognosy, Bioanalysis and Drug Discovery (PBM) unit in the Pharmacy Faculty in Belgium, Brussels. Co-supervised by Prof. Caroline Stévigny and Prof. Sergi Munné Bosch.I worked re-valorizing an industrial by-product of the cocoa industry, the cocoa bean shell. My goal was to analyse the composition of multiple cultivars' shell from around the world by HPLC-MS (HPLC-QTOF-MS) and identify antibacterial molecules in them. High-troughput statistical analysis and modelling techniques were used to determine which were the differentially present compounds of the analyzed shells from around the world. Further, MIC assays were carried out with all of the extracts and we discovered the antibacterial effect of cocoa bean shell extracts in S.mutans, the main dental caries-causing bacteria. This yielded a publication in the pharmacological journal Planta Medica.