Biography

Marcelo Bueno Batista studied Biology for his undergraduate degree at the Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR), Brazil. He subsequently obtained an MSc (2011) and a PhD (2015) in Biochemistry at the same university. During his PhD, he worked as a visiting researcher scientist at the INTA-Balcarce, Argentina (2012), and at the John Innes Centre (JIC), United Kingdom (2013-14).

After finishing his PhD in February 2015, Marcelo did a short postdoc in Brazil. In September 2016, he returned to JIC as a postdoctoral researcher where he deepened his knowledge on the regulation of biological nitrogen fixation and expanded his network of collaborations.

In 2021, he was awarded a BBSRC Discovery Fellowship. In his project, Marcelo will work towards a solution to reduce the impact of agriculture on climate change and to make N fertiliser more accessible to smallholder farmers in developing countries. Using the state-of-the-art facilities at JIC he aims to use innovative approaches spanning different areas of biology to find more sustainable ways to fertilise cereal crops. He aims to do that by understanding the intricacies of the association between free-living nitrogen-fixing bacteria that can naturally colonise cereal crops.