Natalia Pineros-Guerrero is from Villavicencio, Colombia. She received her bachelor’s in Agronomy from Universidad Nacional de Colombia in 2019, minoring in Plant Pathology. Her interest in agriculture began when she joined her father on trips to the countryside in Sibate, Cundinamarca, where large fields of strawberries were located. During these visits to the rural area, she had the opportunity to interact with growers and local communities nurturing her curiosity for crop management and production.
Natalia’s work during college focused on the effect of thermal and in vitro fungicide treatments on pathogens of the genus Fusarium associated with maize seeds. During the last semester of her B.S, she came to the United States for the first time as part of the Undergraduate Research Experience Purdue-Colombia program (UREP-C 2018 II) where she worked for six months with Dr. Janna Beckerman in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology at Purdue University. In Fall 2019, she joined Dr. Telenko’s lab at Purdue University as a master’s student where her research was focused on mapping QoI-fungicide resistance in Cercospora sojina populations, the causal agent of frogeye leaf spot of soybean in Indiana. In addition, she worked on a collaborative project with Dr. Cai’s lab in which the main objective was to determine the frequencies of mating types in C. sojina populations from Indiana to provide evidence for cryptic sexual reproduction. In Summer 2021, she graduated from her master’s program and in Fall 2021 she joined Dr. Pethybridge’s lab at Cornell University as a Ph.D. Student.
Natalia’s research at Cornell has been focusing on the population biology, mating type, and fungicide resistance in the fungal pathogen Stemphylium vesicarium, the causal agent of Stemphylium leaf blight (SLB) of onion. Her research integrates multiple disciplines such as disease management, molecular biology, fungal genetics, epidemiology, and statistics, and collaborates with growers and stakeholders through diverse extension programs like Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE).
