Eleonora Campos - Fulbright NEXUS Scholar
Home Country: Argentina
Grant Dates: 2012/2013
Eleonora Campos is a molecular microbiologist, from Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has a B.A. and a Ph.D. degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires. She is a researcher from the National Council of Research from Argentina, working at the Biotechnology Institute from the National Institute for Agricultural Research. Her area of expertise is molecular biology of cellulolytic bacteria for the generation of biofuels; more specifically, the study of enzymes that deconstruct cellulose and hemicelluloses in order to obtain bioethanol from agricultural or forestry residues.
Her thesis dissertation work was done under the supervision of Dr. Osvaldo Rossetti. Then she moved to Brazil and was a Postdoctoral fellow from National Council of Research (CNPQ) at Carlos Chagas-Fiocruz Institute-Curitiba. Both during her Ph.D. and her postdoc, she went for short-term research experiences at different prestigious laboratories such as the Department de Virologie, AFMB, Marseille, France; the Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Institute of Microbiology, School of Medicine, East Carolina University, with fellowships from the American Society for Microbiology and Fulbright. During her research career she has published several articles in peer-based international journals and presented her work at national, regional and international scientific meetings; she has taught in graduate and undergraduate courses and she has supervised doctoral and undergraduate students.
She is now responsible for two research projects in second generation biofuels: a bi-national (Argentina-Spain) project for “Evaluation of lignocellulosic biomass feedstock and search for novel hydrolytic enzymes for the production of bioethanol” (2012-2015) and a smaller project for “Prospection of bacterial cellulases from soil samples from native forest of Misiones, for biotechnological use in obtaining bioethanol” (2012-2015).
Eleonora’s Fulbright NEXUS proposal is focused on sustainable bioenergy, by studying the development of alternatives to fossil based fuels. Lignocellulosic biomass has the potential to highly contribute to the goal of liquid fuel demands, in a sustainable way, without competing for the use of cultivable land resources or hampering environmental balance. However, in order to be able to fully use this renewable resource, it is necessary to deconstruct plant cell wall efficiently and optimize the biochemical conversion of cellulose to its fermentable components. Agricultural and forestry residues are amongst the most prominent biomass sources. The great challenge for their utilization is the chemical and structural complexity of the plant cell wall (biomass recalcitrance), formed mainly by cellulose immersed in a matrix of hemicelluloses and associated to lignin. Based on this, the main objective of her research project is the functional characterization of novel enzymes involved in cellulose and hemicelluloses degradation for the generation of bioethanol from agricultural and forestry residues. It is expected that the results generated by this project would help to provide critical guidance towards the overall feasibility of a sustainable use of lignocellulosic biomass.