Marta Prado

Marta Prado got her advanced degree in Food Science and Technology in 1999 from the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). On 2005 she obtained her PhD from the same university in the program of Nutrition, Bromatology and Food technology. Between 2006 and 2010, she has been working as Scientific Officer in the Food Safety and Quality Unit at the Institute of Reference Materials and Measurements from the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (EC-JRC-IRMM) in Geel, Belgium. She participated in several national and European research projects and she also coordinated an exploratory research project for the development of methods for quantification of fish DNA on food and feed samples by real-time PCR.

Her research experience is related with genomics and proteomics tools and its application to food and feed control. During the last years she has been working on the development of real-time PCR methods for their application in food and environmental analysis, in particular to ensure the quality and authenticity of food products in the food chain. She has been working on the evaluation of the fitness-for-purpose of such methods, including transferability between laboratories, and their quantification potential. From November 2010 she works as research fellow at the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory (INL), her research interests at the moment are the application of magnetic nanobiosensors on food analysis, the development of new, fast and reliable detection methodologies combining molecular biology and nanotechnology and the application of biosensors as a tool to ensure safety and quality along the food chain.