Name: Adrián Delgado Ollero
Where do you come from: Madrid, Spain.
What have you worked on before coming to the Water Institute?
- Recently I have been working in Barcelona, Spain, in the pharmaceutical company ‘LetiPharma’ as a scientific advisor to the CEO and providing scientific support to their business units. The work involved developing vaccines against canine-leishmaniosis disease and studying how global warming is increasingly affecting the spread of these types of diseases.
- I worked doing my master’s thesis at Interdisciplinary Centre of Marine and Environmental Research in Porto, Portugal, in Vitor Vasconcelos´s group. I spent time researching the potential toxicity of cyanobacteria in critical public-water spots and catchment areas.
- I worked as a student/research assistant microbiologist doing my bachelor’s thesis in the water-cyanobacteria laboratory in the Autonomous University of Madrid in Antonio Quesada´s group researching how temperature affects the transcription of sxt-genes that are involved in the release of toxic metabolites in water.
Why your interest in Marine Science?
As a biologist, I have always very much related to nature, life and all the changes that occur in them. In the second year of my bachelor’s degree, during my holiday period I started to work helping PhD students on water related topics and little by little I realized that water is one of the most important resources in the world. In Spain it is not managed properly: areas succumb to periods of drought, pollution and even toxification. Gradually I specialized in cyanobacteria and microbiological analysis of water quality from a molecular point of view, trying to understand how some of the toxins they release, as anatoxins, PSP (Paralytic Shellfish Poison) etc. could affect not only human health but of course economics and the environment.
My knowledge learned over the years in the area of marine research will be useful to combat problems such as toxicity of red algae-PSP toxins or even combat the biofouling that is formed in the hulls of boats producing drag-problems. Drag causes them to spend more fuel and therefore there is more pollution, it requires money to clean them and there are even problems of colonization of invasive species that can be transported great distances after attaching to a hull.
What will you do at the Water Institute?
Future PhD student in bioinspired biofouling research and currently supporting the Water Institute as a research assistant and communications Intern