Researcher
Univerdidad del Desarrollo, Chile
Disclosure(s): No financial relationships to disclose
Lorena Diaz received her undergraduate degree as a bacteriologist in 2004 and her Ph.D in Biological Sciences from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Colombia, in 2013. Lorena joined Dr. Cesar Arias research group “Molecular Genetics and Antimicrobial Resistance Unit” at Universidad El Bosque since 2006. In 2010 Lorena was awarded an ASM-PAHO Infectious Diseases Epidemiology and Surveillance Fellowship with Dr. Arias at the University of Texas Medical School. Her research has been focused on the study of clinical Gram-positive bacteria resistant to antibiotics, participating in multicenter surveillances in Colombia and Latin America. She has also participated in studies focused on the elucidating of mechanisms of resistance to linezolid, vancomycin and daptomycin and epidemiology of infectious diseases caused by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant Enterococci (VRE). As part of the doctoral training, Lorena joined the Laboratory for Antimicrobial Research at the University of Texas in Houston, also directed by Dr. Arias. Over this time, she acquired expertise implementing strategies of bacterial mutagenesis and animal infection models. Following her doctoral training and with the aim of designing and leading the “Microbial Genomics Lab” at the University El Bosque, she completed a training in whole genome sequencing on Illumina and PacBio platforms, bacterial genomes assembly, comparative genomics, RNASeq and phylogenetic analysis at Columbia University, the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics at the Museum of Natural History in New York and the Jackson Laboratory in Connecticut. Currently Lorena is a researcher at the “Genomics and Resistant Microbe (GeRM)” directed by Dr Jose M. Munita, at La Universidad del Desarrollo, which has the laboratory and computational infrastructure to accomplish microbial genomics studies.