The Department of Food Sciences and Nutrition at the Faculty of Health Sciences is holding a public lecture entitled 'Effect of Climate Change on the contamination of food commodities by fungal toxins'. The talk will be held on Friday 1 December between 14:30 and 16:00 in C2 in Mater Dei Hospital (Seminar Room 2, Opposite the Chapel in Mater Dei Hospital).
Speaker: Dr Angel Medina-Vaya PhD MRSB AFHEA
Speaker: Dr Angel Medina-Vaya PhD MRSB AFHEA
AgriFood MSc Programme Director
MSc Food Chain Systems Course Director
Lecturer in Food Mycology
Applied Mycology Group,
Cranfield Soil and AgriFood Institute
Dr Medina obtained his PhD degree in Microbiology in 2007 at the University of Valencia (Spain). Subsequently, he worked in the food industry until he obtained a post-doctoral grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation to work in the Applied Mycology Group at Cranfield University (UK) from January 2009 to August 2010. During this post-doctoral training period he applied and was successfully granted a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship (Intra-European Fellowships for Career Development) to develop the project “Mechanism of action of antifungals against mycotoxigenic species: from molecular to phenotypic efficacy” (PIEF-GA-2009-253014) (September 2010 to August 2012).
Dr. Medina has focused his research interests on the impact that environmental stress has on the functioning of fungi (mainly mycotoxigenic species), the mechanisms used for ecophysiological tolerance, and the molecular basis of secondary metabolite production, especially mycotoxins. He has been developing research on ecophysiology, molecular ecology and modelling of mycotoxigenic fungi growth and toxin production for more than 13 years. In the last few years his research has examined how to integrate and use “big data” (RNAseq, metabolomics, microarray data, growth and toxin data under interacting environmental conditions) using a systems approach and this has also been useful in the examination of Climate Change factors on the life cycle of such fungi. This is now his main area of research where he is trying to integrate these datasets from key food chains to enable fit for purpose accurate risks prediction, control and minimisation strategies under the forecasted environmental changes. He has currently supervised 5 completed PhDs and has 9 PhD students. He has published 65 peer reviewed journal papers and 10 book chapters and has an H-factor of 23 (Google Scholar).