Esperanza Martinez Romero

Biography:

Professor Esperanza Martínez-Romero is a professor and head of the Genomic Ecology Program at the Genomic Sciences Center at UNAM. She studies the mutualistic symbioses of bacteria with plants and animals native to Mexico using metagenomic and functional genomics approaches. She was a pioneer in the molecular study of the nitrogen-fixing symbioses of beans and endophytes of corn and beans. She has given workshops and advice to agricultural producers. She described new species of bacteria from plants and insects from Mexico, some of them nitrogen-fixing bacteria. The strains that she obtained have been deposited in official bacterial collections and some of them are used as inoculants or biofertilizers in agriculture. She has received awards and prizes such as the National University Award, the Mexican Academy of Sciences Award and recently, the National Science Award of Mexico in December of 2019 and the UNESCO Prize for Women in Science in March 2020. She has been recognized as a highly cited Mexican scientist. She has published 216 articles in international journals, 23 book chapters and 11 genome announcements. She has received more than 20,400 citations to her published work, with an H-index of 80.