Fitxa persona

. Misericordia Jiménez Escamilla is Full Professor of Microbiology at the Dept. of Microbiology and Ecology at the University of Valencia. She started her research and teaching activities at the Dept. of Biotechnology (Polytechnic University of Valencia) in 1980, where she completed her PhD Thesis. She has been professor of General Microbiology and other applied Microbiology subjects in several Master's degrees and Biology, Biotechnology, and Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences degrees. She has tutored more than a hundred of Internships in companies and has taught specialized courses aimed at higher technicians. Likewise, she was a guest professor at the Institute of Sciences of Food Production (CNR, Italy), a center of international prestige in the field of fungi and mycotoxins. Her research activity has been developed in the areas of Microbiology and Analytical Chemistry applied to Food Science and Technology. She is the head of the research line 'Mycology and mycotoxins' at the Dep. of Microbiology of the UV since 1988, and senior researcher of a group of excellence. Her work marked the beginning of research on mycotoxins and toxigenic fungi in food in Spain. She has worked on important agricultural crops (citrus, grapes, cereals, nuts). Her research initially focused on the detection/characterization of fungi and metabolites with biological activity and found new species and compounds with acaricide or insecticidal activity, which were transferred to the business sector through University-Company agreements. Later, she has addressed her research to the study of mycotoxins (zearalenone, trichothecenes, fumonisins, ochratoxin A, patulin, aflatoxins, etc.) in cereals, fruits and derivatives such as beer, juice and wine. Highlights of her research in this phase are the design/optimization of methods for characterizing toxigenic fungi, study of their ecophysiology and antifungal resistance, design of strategies for elimination of mycotoxins in food, development of predictive models for prevention and sustainable control of toxigenic fungi, development of LC-MS analytical methods for mycotoxin determination, study of mycotoxin effect on animal neural cells and, more recently, investigation on the activity of silver nanoparticles, essential oils and bioactive packaging to inhibit fungal growth and mycotoxin production. She has published almost a hundred articles in high impact factor journals, more than 20 book chapters of international edition and has presented more than 200 contributions to congresses, mostly international. She directed various PhD theses, graduate and master's theses, researches for 'DEA', etc. Furthermore, she participated in 4 contracts with companies and in 20 competitive projects, several of them coordinated, mostly as Principal investigator and coordinator. She was a member of the Management Committee and national representative in COST Action 835 (1998-2003) together with European groups with whom she collaborates. Likewise she was coordinator of the Microbiology group in thematic R+D networks (SICURA, Especia®), she participates in the IViSoCA microcluster (VLC/Campus) and is a member of the MICOFOOD network. She has acted as evaluator of projects of the ANEP, the FECYT and autonomous entities, and she is a reviewer of manuscripts submitted to various prestigious journals. She is a member of several societies of Microbiology. The CNEAI and the University of Valencia have positively assessed 6 six-year research and 6 five-year teaching requested periods.