The Jakob Eriksson Prize is the premier award for achievements in plant pathology. Restrepo will be recognized during the International Congress of Plant Pathology, in Lyon (France). This is announced in an official communiqué.
Restrepo is the second woman to receive this award and the 13th Colombian woman in almost 100 years of history.
The work of this Colombian woman focuses on the bacterial infection of cassava, caused by Xanthomonas axonopodis pv. manihot. “She was the first to develop and apply molecular markers to understand population structure and evolution. She also helped producers create pathogen-resistant cassava varieties, which significantly reduced the losses of Latin American farmers who were forced to burn their harvest the following year. year due to illness,” reads the website of the Universidad de Los Andes, where she is Vice Rector for Research and Creation.
Silvia Restrepo has also participated in other large-scale collaborative projects such as Laboratoire Mixte International and GROW Colombia, where she has demonstrated her talent in coordinating different areas of scientific research, team organization and co-creation opportunities for contexts of different disciplinary and cultural.
This professor “has used her creative ideas to build bridges with other Colombian and international universities”, in addition to creating a specialization program in bioinformatics and a graduate program in computational biology at UniAndes.
The award that this scientist will receive is given by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the gold medal at the meeting of the International Society for Plant Pathology (ISPP). The award was established in 1923 to honor the memory of Jakob Eriksson, the eminent Swedish mycologist and plant pathologist.
