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PhD student (since October 2024)
MSc in Agricultural Sciences, Universidad Nacional de Colombia (UNAL)
BSc in Agronomic Engineering, Universidad Nacional de Colombia (UNAL)
Lecturer, Universidad ICESI (bioinformatics and metagenomics)
My main goal in life is to figure out how life works. Since that's impossible, given how many forms of life are out there, I'm currently focused on explaining how bacteria live together inside soybean nodules. My other big passion is teaching. I love turning really complex ideas into simple ones that my students can understand and that make them want to keep learning.
I grew up on a small farm in Colombia and was always curious about how things work. Going to university isn't common in my hometown, but luckily I got to go. In my very first plant biology class, I was amazed by how complex life can be and how fascinating it is to understand it. Later, in molecular biology, I learned that Agrobacterium can infect plants and cause tumors. Then, in agricultural microbiology, I met the two people to blame for my interest in plant-associated microbes: Professor Daniel Uribe and his PhD student, Vanessa Otero. They gave me my start as a scientist, studying legume microbiomes under different soil management practices and how those conditions affect nitrogen fixation. Whenever I wasn't in class, I was in Professor Uribe's lab, learning everything I could about plant-associated microbes.
After my undergrad, I worked as a research assistant at Universidad del Valle with Janeth Sanabria, who showed me a different way of looking at microbes. At the same time, I was doing my master's, and that's when I discovered microbiome engineering. I realized that we can go beyond describing what a microbiome is made of and what it does, and actually shape those traits in a bioreactor under specific conditions. I developed a nitrogen-fixing microbiome that worked as a biofertilizer on tomato plants, and its assembly process is now going through the patent process. During my master's, I also did a research stay in Canada, where I met Pascale and Isabelle, who are now my PhD supervisors and who I get to learn from every day.
In my PhD project, I'm trying to understand whether the symbiosis between soybean and Bradyrhizobium is really just a two-player relationship, or whether other bacteria we don't know much about yet are also involved. Progress can be a little slow, since greenhouse experiments take a long time and sometimes have to be repeated, but little by little we're finding clues.
The common thread throughout my academic path has been biological nitrogen fixation. I feel lucky to have worked on it during my undergrad, master's, and PhD theses. I think it's one of the most important biological processes for life on Earth, and as an agronomist, I want to better understand it and add to what we know about it so we can design more sustainable farming practices.
What do I do in my free time? I love pretty much anything outdoors. I can spend hours in the forest with my camera, capturing what no one else can see, sometimes i share my pictures in my Instagram account (@nicolasr_98). I also love cooking traditional Colombian food for my non-Colombian friends.
Andres.Nicolas.Rodriguez.Romero[@]USherbrooke.ca
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