Valeria Souza

Biosketch

Dr. Valeria Guadalupe Souza is a Senior Researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Institute of Ecology. She obtained a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree and a doctorate from the UNAM. She has two post-doctorates under the tutelage of Dr. Richard Lenski. She has been a researcher at UNAM at the Institute of Ecology since 1993.
Dr. Souza’s work area is Evolutionary Ecology and Molecular Evolution of Microorganisms, and works with the question: why there are so many species? That is, what are the evolutionary, physiological and ecological processes that separate organisms that form populations into new species. She also wants to understand how several similar species can coexist in a particular site, and to know what networks of interactions they form. Its main study site has been for the last 25 years the Cuatro Ciénegas Basin, an endangered oasis in Coahuila, in the North of Mexico in the Chihuahuan desert. More recently, she has been working as chief scientist of the project “Microbiome of the external Surface of keystone species of ecological and economic importance in the region the Magallanes y de la Antártica chilena: microbes as bioindicators of the aquatic ecosystem health in a global warming scenario” supported by the government of Chile. Moreover, she is developing a bacterial consortia capable of close the nitrogen cycle in aquaculture and in the eutrophicated waters, looking for a healthier ocean. Dr. Souza loves teaching and interacting with young people, and has directed many Ph.D. thesis, and manys former students are now researchers.

Research Interests

As a young professor I explored how pathogenic islands were built using a large sample of E. coli from wild mammals, observing that recombination was more critical than previously thought in E. coli. Allowing different parts of the island to respond to selection.
In 1999, NASA took me to study stromatolites and microbial mats of Cuatro Cienegas. In this endangered oasis we described everything that we could using molecular tools before the wetland collapsed, finding a very diverse “lost world” that had been isolated for Eons. The deeper layers contain living bacteria and archaea that separated from their common ancestor in the Archaean. Most of these lineages had diversified locally under extremely oligotrophic conditions. Making the oasis one of the most diverse places on Earth in microorganism. In order to save the oasis from overexploitation of its deep aquifer we devoted ourselves to education and awareness of the problem. Now the local high schoolers are exploring their own biotechnological potential with molecular tools. The wetland is starting to recover due to change of policy and local awareness.
In my quest to link DNA to the diversity explosion in the early Archaean Eon, I found in microbial mats all the biogeochemical cycles that rule our living planet. In the deep past these cycles started by being assembled piece by piece, and each layer of the mat is part of such assembly, making homeostasis local.
In the South of Chile, in the Magallanes region, we have a very holistic approach to understand the role of the Antropocene in the Austral biodiversity.