Carmen Collado Amores

Carmen Collado Amores

ERC Project (STG): The power of maternal microbes on infant health (MAMI):

Recent reports suggest that early microbial colonisation plays an important role in health promotion. This can help reduce the risk of chronic diseases such as obesity, allergies and inflammatory conditions. Maternal microbiota plays a crucial role in health programming. This process starts in the uterus and is modulated by the delivery method and diet. The project aims to characterise the maternal microbes to be transferred to new-borns and determine their role in child health programming.

More about Carmen Collado Amores

Bio

I was born in Barcelona in 1976. Since I was little, I’ve loved sciences, biology, animals, plants, etc. so I always knew I wanted to work with living organisms. When I had to choose a university course, I didn’t know what to pick because there was so much to choose from. However, I was influenced by my father who was an engineer, so I went for Agricultural Engineering, at the agricultural engineering school at Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (UPV). During my degree, I was fascinated by Enrique Hernández’s classes on food microbiology and fermentation processes and, from then on, my interest grew in food and bacteria and its possible effects on health, even more so when I had the chance to do some work experience in the Microbiology Department of the UPV. I liked it so much that I carried on and I did my degree dissertation and doctoral dissertation on microbiology of food, working with probiotics. At the same time, I continued my training by taking a Food Science and Technology degree at the UPV.

When I finished my doctoral dissertation, I got post-doc funding to work in the group run by Prof. Seppo Salminen in Finland, a pioneering group in studies with Probiotics and their effects on human health as well as microbiota. It was an amazing learning experience and incredible in every aspect, both professional and personal, I still miss the cold and the darkness of those winters… giving me great experience and new knowledge, I came back to Spain and I joined the IATA-CSIC Probiotics and prebiotics group in Valencia, led by Prof. Gaspar Pérez. We worked on molecular analysis and assessment of the health effects from beneficial bacteria and probiotics, as well as host-microbiota interactions. They were intense years, putting the knowledge I had acquired into practice, requesting funding from the Ramon y Cajal Programme, applying for Tenured Scientist positions at CSIC that I eventually achieved in 2012, requesting projects and funding, etc. that overlapped with the time when my three children were born, making it hard to get everything done at times.

In 2015, following this line of work, food-microbiota, and thanks to funding from a European project investigating the role of material bacteria in our children’s health, I was able to start my own line of research. This was a major challenge at all levels, but it has been possible thanks to help from my group and members of my laboratory. We are seeing the great importance of bacteria in the maternal diet that colonise their children and this opens up new possibilities for research. Now we are ready to continue doing good science and carry on making progress in our knowledge on food in terms of our bacteria and our health. As the saying goes “We are what we eat”, but we are also what our bacteria is eating.

Bio

I was born in Barcelona in 1976. Since I was little, I’ve loved sciences, biology, animals, plants, etc. so I always knew I wanted to work with living organisms. When I had to choose a university course, I didn’t know what to pick because there was so much to choose from. However, I was influenced by my father who was an engineer, so I went for Agricultural Engineering, at the agricultural engineering school at Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (UPV). During my degree, I was fascinated by Enrique Hernández’s classes on food microbiology and fermentation processes and, from then on, my interest grew in food and bacteria and its possible effects on health, even more so when I had the chance to do some work experience in the Microbiology Department of the UPV. I liked it so much that I carried on and I did my degree dissertation and doctoral dissertation on microbiology of food, working with probiotics. At the same time, I continued my training by taking a Food Science and Technology degree at the UPV.

When I finished my doctoral dissertation, I got post-doc funding to work in the group run by Prof. Seppo Salminen in Finland, a pioneering group in studies with Probiotics and their effects on human health as well as microbiota. It was an amazing learning experience and incredible in every aspect, both professional and personal, I still miss the cold and the darkness of those winters… giving me great experience and new knowledge, I came back to Spain and I joined the IATA-CSIC Probiotics and prebiotics group in Valencia, led by Prof. Gaspar Pérez. We worked on molecular analysis and assessment of the health effects from beneficial bacteria and probiotics, as well as host-microbiota interactions. They were intense years, putting the knowledge I had acquired into practice, requesting funding from the Ramon y Cajal Programme, applying for Tenured Scientist positions at CSIC that I eventually achieved in 2012, requesting projects and funding, etc. that overlapped with the time when my three children were born, making it hard to get everything done at times.

In 2015, following this line of work, food-microbiota, and thanks to funding from a European project investigating the role of material bacteria in our children’s health, I was able to start my own line of research. This was a major challenge at all levels, but it has been possible thanks to help from my group and members of my laboratory. We are seeing the great importance of bacteria in the maternal diet that colonise their children and this opens up new possibilities for research. Now we are ready to continue doing good science and carry on making progress in our knowledge on food in terms of our bacteria and our health. As the saying goes “We are what we eat”, but we are also what our bacteria is eating.

ERC Project (STG): The power of maternal microbes on infant health (MAMI):

Recent reports suggest that early microbial colonisation plays an important role in health promotion. This can help reduce the risk of chronic diseases such as obesity, allergies and inflammatory conditions. Maternal microbiota plays a crucial role in health programming. This process starts in the uterus and is modulated by the delivery method and diet. The project aims to characterise the maternal microbes to be transferred to new-borns and determine their role in child health programming.

More about Carmen Collado Amores