Sara Hernández

I carried out my pre-doctoral stay in the CBP group at Dept. of Genetics of the Universitat de València with a fellowship to investigate the distribution of Bacillus thuringiensis toxins and their interaction with receptors in pest insects. As a result, I obtained my PhD (best thesis award by the Univ. Valencia) in 2005. I was Associate Researcher in a long agreement between Bayer BioScience N.V. (Belgium) and the Univ. València during my pre- and post-doctoral period, studying the mode of action of toxins from B. thuringiensis. I have participated in several projects for the development of microbial bioinsecticides, one of them with a post-doctoral fellowship as a Principal Investigator of a project funded by the Generalitat Valenciana (2008). In 2011, I obtained an IEF-Marie Curie Fellowship to stay in the University of Bath (UK) for two years. During this time, I investigated the role of insects in the evolution of B. anthracis from B. cereus as head post-doc in Dr. Waterfield’s group. After this time, I joined again the Univ. Valencia to work as a Research Manager of the ERI BIOTECMED, a scientific network of 19 groups in the fields of Biotechnology and Biomedicine (2013-2016). Since 2016, I have been working with Dr. González-Cabrera in the study of resistance mechanisms to acaricides in Varroa destructor, a parasite of the honey bee. In 2021, I joined the Dept. of Microbiology and Ecology at the University of Valencia as Assistant Professor.