Maria Isabel Navarro Mendoza

My research aims to understand how pathogenic fungi sense their environment and hosts, focusing on the genetic regulation mechanisms responsible for virulence and antifungal drug resistance. I began working with the early-diverging fungus Mucor circinelloides as an undergraduate student in Biology, later specializing in Molecular Biology and Biotechnology. During my Ph.D. at the University of Murcia in Spain, I focused on identifying new virulence factors in Mucorales and characterizing the centromeric chromatin regulated by RNAi in these fungi. As a postdoctoral researcher in the Heitman lab at Duke University in the USA, I focused on antifungal drug resistances controlled by epigenetic mechanisms, including RNAi-driven epimutation, transposable elements, and chromatin remodeling in human fungal pathogens. Currently, I am an assistant professor in the Department of Microbiology at Universidad Miguel Hernandez in Spain. My goal is to analyze the impact of epimutation on antimicrobial drug resistance and pathogenicity, focusing on host-pathogen interactions.