Senior Editor

Dr. Maria Marco, Ph.D. completed her undergraduate degree in microbiology at The Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania. She received her doctoral degree at the University of California, Berkeley in the field of plant microbiology. Dr. Marco then performed postdoctoral research on probiotics and gut microbiology at the Wageningen Centre for Food Science in The Netherlands. She was subsequently a project leader at NIZO Food Research and TI Food and Nutrition, The Netherlands. Dr. Marco started her faculty position at the University of California, Davis in 2009 and has been a tenured professor in the Department of Food Science and Technology since 2015. Dr. Marco received the Distinguished Lecturer Award from the American Society for Microbiology. She is on the Board of Directors of the International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics and is a founding member of the advisory board for The Fermentation Association. Dr. Marco is also currently serving as the Chair of the Food Science Graduate Group at the University of California, Davis. Dr. Marco has 19 years of experience investigating probiotics, fermented foods, and gastrointestinal microbiology. Her laboratory is also broadly engaged in the ecology and genetics of lactic acid bacteria, a group of microorganisms required for making fermented foods and applied as probiotics. This research employs methods in microbiome research in addition to molecular genetic and biochemical approaches to investigating microorganisms in complex food and intestinal environments. The broad objective of her studies is to identify the attributes of microorganisms that can be used to benefit human health.

Lactobacillus, Fermented foods, Lactic acid bacteria, Probiotics, Postbiotics, Bacteriocins, Microbiome, Gastrointestinal health