December 14-15, 2021
Professor in the Department of Food Science and Technology and Chair of the Food Science Graduate Group at the University of California
Maria Marco is a Professor in the Department of Food Science and Technology and Chair of the Food Science Graduate Group at the University of California, Davis. Dr. Marco has 20 years’ experience investigating fermented foods, probiotics, and diet-dependent, host-microbe interactions in digestive tract. She received a B.S. in microbiology from The Pennsylvania State University, a Ph.D. in microbial biology from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a postdoc with Michiel Kleerebezem in the Wageningen Centre for Food Science, The Netherlands.
Her laboratory at UC Davis is broadly engaged in the study of food and intestinal microbiomes and the ecology and genetics of lactic acid bacteria, a group of microorganisms required for making fermented foods and applied as probiotics. She is on the Board of Directors of the International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics and is a scientific advisor for The Fermentation Association. She is currently leading a national, community science initiative on fermented foods called EATLAC.
