Rodrigo Mendes

Biography

Rodrigo Mendes is Head of Research and Development at Embrapa Meio Ambiente, where he is a researcher at the Laboratory of Environmental Microbiology. He is also an advisor and professor in the Graduate Program in Agricultural Microbiology at the University of São Paulo. He graduated in Agronomic Engineering from the University of São Paulo in 2002 with a specialization in Biotechnology, where he developed the first research related to the interaction between microbial communities and plants (FAPESP Fellow). He holds a PhD in Plant Genetics and Improvement in 2008 (FAPESP Fellow) at the Genetics Department of the University of São Paulo, including 13 months as a guest researcher (CAPES Fellow) at the Phytopathology Laboratory at the University of Wageningen, The Netherlands. Between January 2008 and April 2009 he worked as a researcher for CanaVialis / Monsanto in the sugarcane breeding program and from April 2009 to November 2010 he worked as an associate researcher (Postdoctoral Fellow - NWO grant) in the group of Bacterial Ecology and Phytopathology Laboratory at the University of Wageningen. He was a visiting researcher at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, United States, at Rothamsted Research, UK, and guest lecturer at the Isaac Newton Institute at the University of Cambridge, UK. Rodrigo Mendes is executive secretary of the international research program "Back to the Roots" [http://backrootsproject.wix.com/backroots], and their studies focus on the interactions between complex microbial communities and their hosts to understand how microbiomas sustain the life of higher organisms [http://rrmendess.wix.com/rdgmendeslab]. In 2011 he published an important finding in the journal Science revealing how bacterial communities naturally defend plants against infections caused by soil pathogens. 

Research Interest

Agricultural Microbiology