My name is Sara. I currently work as a bioinformatician at the Estación Experimental Aula Dei (EEAD-CSIC), an agricultural research centre of the CSIC in Zaragoza.
Previously, I did my PhD at the Centro de Investigación y Tecnología Agroalimentaria de Aragón (CITA) under the supervision of Javier Rodrigo. My thesis dealt with floral biology in apricot. In recent years there has been a great varietal renewal in this crop, and many new cultivars have appeared about which hardly any information was available. With my thesis, we determined the pollination requirements of a large number of cultivars and evaluated different methods to determine their chilling requirements. We also carried out a study of genetic diversity to know the current state of the crop. During my PhD I discovered the world of bioinformatics and began training in this field through a master's degree and a higher vocational degree. I also did several research stays to go deeper into the subject, such as in Bonn (Germany), in the department that developed the R package chillR, and in Guillem Ylla's Bioinformatics and Genome Biology lab in Kraków (Poland), where I carried out a transcriptomic study.
After finishing my PhD, I started working as head of bioinformatics in a company developing molecular diagnostic kits. My job consisted of developing tools to analyse and interpret the results of the kits that the company developed or distributed from other companies. During that time I learned a lot about both programming and project management. However, agriculture and free software are my passion, so I applied for the CLIMACER project of the Momentum call.
I currently work on this project at Aula Dei. It consists of developing an API for the automatic download of climate data from several sources and the calculation of agroclimatic indices. We will also apply the tool in genotype-environment association studies. It is a very exciting project, since its aim is that it can be used and applied by different users in a wide variety of crops. It also allows me to use all the knowledge acquired during my career and to keep learning with two great researchers, Bruno Contreras and Santiago Beguería, and their teams.
