Mariana Matus
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Wageningen University, MS, 2012
Mariana Matus | |
|---|---|
| Born | Mariana Guadalupe Matus Garcia Mexico City, Mexico |
| Citizenship | Mexico, United States |
| Alma mater | Massachusetts Institute of Technology, PhD, 2018 Wageningen University, MS, 2012 |
| Known for | CEO of Biobot Analytics |
| Children | 2 |
| Awards | 2022 Time100 NEXT, 2023 Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellow |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computational Biology, Epidemiology, Microbiology |
| Institutions | Biobot Analytics, CEO and Co-founder |
| Thesis | Analysis of fecal biomarkers to impact clinical care and public health (2018) |
| Doctoral advisor | Eric Alm |
Mariana Matus is a Mexican biologist and the CEO and co-founder of Biobot Analytics, a startup that aims to help governments tackle the opioid crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic by analyzing sewage samples.
Matus was born in Mexico City. She grew up in San Luis Potosí, Mexico.[1] She attended National Autonomous University of Mexico, where she received her Bachelor of Science in genomics[2] in 2009. She then attended Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands,[1] where she received her Master of Science in biotechnology. She next moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to attend Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she received her Doctor of Philosophy in computational biology and systems biology in 2018 under the mentorship of Eric J. Alm.[3]
Her doctoral work centered on exploring the potential of using fecal biomarkers to understand epidemiological trends,[1][3] which led to a $4 million (USD) grant from the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences[1] and later became the basis for her company Biobot Analytics. She performed a genomics and metabolomics analysis of wastewater sampled in residential sewage and was able to identify thousands of bacteria and metabolites that were the result of human activity over the course of a 24-hour period.[4] In addition to this work, she also collaborated with researchers in Germany to perform a microbiome analysis in mice and humans, which found that the bacteria Lactobacillus murinus can act as a probiotic to reduce the likelihood of hypertension and cardiovascular disease.[5][6]