Laura Pinto Utz presented PUCRS-PrInt and research possibilities at Pró-Mata
Professor Dr Laura Pinto Utz went on a mission abroad to University of Salford, in the UK, under the Institutional Project of Internationalization (PUCRS-PrInt). She is working on the international cooperation project Genomic Advances and their impacts on the Study of Biodiversity, coordinated by Professor Dr Sandro Luís Bonatto, under the priority area Technology and Biodiversity: Sustainability, Energy and the Environment.
The purpose of the mission was to analyze the data of the research that is being developed in collaboration with the British institution and to introduce it to the PUCRS-PrInt opportunities. Utz gave a lecture about the project to the faculty of the institution’s School of Sciences. It followed a presentation to introduce the audience to the Pró-Mata Center for Environmental Research and Conservation, and its structure for research and graduate programs.
“This was very important because the University of Salford’s School of Sciences has a number of graduate courses that focus on field practices that are generally conducted in other countries. The faculty was very excited about the possibility of completing those courses at Pró-Mata”, Laura says.
In addition, her visit to the institution allowed her to meet researchers who work in projects that are complementary to research projects developed at PUCRS, in order to advance new institutional collaborations. PUCRS believes that this is a way to further strengthen international cooperation projects involving the two universities.
Ongoing research
The research project that looks at the diversity of organisms in the accumulated water inside bromeliad leaves as well as in adjacent soil has been developed in partnership with Professor Joe Taylor of the University of Salford, who came to PUCRS in June under the PUCRS-PrInt as a Visiting Professor. “In this project, we are right now finishing data generation and starting to work on the analysis stage”, Laura says. The study should be published in an international journal by the end of this year. In addition, Professor Joe Taylor will serve as co-advisor of the PhD thesis of student Fernanda Benedetto Gazulha of the Graduate Program in Ecology and Evolution of Biodiversity.
Laura also attended the European Congress of Protistology (ECOP), in Italy, as she delivered a lecture on the research lines she does her research on at PUCRS.
