Fatima Maria de Souza Moreira

Born in 1953 in Rio de Janeiro. Agricultural Engineer from UFRRJ in 1977. MSc in 1983 - Biological Sciences, concentration area Botany, with extra credits in Ecology in the partnership between the National Institute for Amazonian Research and the Amazonas University Foundation. PhD in Agronomy - Soils - 1991 at UFRRJ and sandwich at the University of Ghent, Belgium. Three Post-Doctorates in Molecular Biology: National Autonomous University of Mexico (1991), York University (1995), and Michigan State University (2001). Among others, she did internships at ORSTOM (Senegal) and Institute Pasteur, took courses organized by the International Institute of Advanced Studies/UNESCO (Venezuela) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (Austria). She developed a research project with the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry and from 2002 to 2010 a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional and multinational project with the Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility Programme of the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (Kenya) with funding from the United Nations and implementation of the United Nations Environmental Programme (Conservation and sustainable Management of Below Ground Biodiversity - GF2715/02), of which she was coordinator in Brazil, where the project was called BiosBrasil, (www.biosbrasil.ufla.br) (research group of CNPq). From 1978 to 1993 she was a researcher at INPA, and from 1993 onwards, she was a professor in the Department of Soil Science at UFLA in the areas of Soil Microbiology and Biochemistry, Environmental and Agricultural Microbiology with emphasis on biodiversity, BNF, bioinputs, microbial processes, quality indicators and soil pollution. From November 3 to June 21 she was coordinator of the PG course in Soil Science at UFLA, from August 2011 to August 2015 she was director of the soil processes and properties division of SBCS and from August 2015 to July 2019 president of SBCS. She is a CNPq researcher 1A, member of the CA of Agronomy / CNPq from 2013 to 2016 and in 2017 she was a member, in 2018-19 coordinator and in 2023 pro-tempore of CAG Fapemig. She has published (authored and co-authored) 280 articles in national and international specialized journals and 12 works in event annals. She has 52 published chapters. She edited 19 books and wrote another 6. She has 40 items of technical production. She gave 82 lectures at events abroad and in Brazil. He has supervised 47 master's dissertations and co-supervised 25, supervised 44 doctoral theses and co-supervised 21, in addition to having supervised 143 scientific initiation students, 29 undergraduate TCCs, and 68 supervisions of other nature and 17 postdocs. He has received 10 awards and/or honors. He has participated in/coordinated 28 research projects (national and international). He coordinates the research, technology and innovation network project at Fapemig. He is a member of the scientific advisory committee of the Global Soil Biodiversity Initiative and was on the scientific council of the Serrapilheira Institute (2017-20). He has interacted with several collaborators from several national and international institutions. She was included among the best scientists in the world due to her production throughout her career (Ioannidis et al., PLOS Biology, 2020) and in the list of Latin America Top 10,000 Scientists-AD Scientific Index 2021 -25 and Stanford University. She discovered new rhizobium symbioses in genera and species of legumes. She described 8 new N2-fixing bacterial species (Azospirillum amazonense, Mesorhizobium plurifarium, Azorhizobium doebereinerae, Bradyrhizobium brasilense, B.forestalis, B.uaiense, B.campsiandrae, B. amazonense) and reported this characteristic in Cupriavidus necator, Burkholderia fungorum, B.lata and B.contaminans. She has two strains of Bradyrhizobium sp. (INPA 3-11B and UFLA3-84) approved by MAPA as inoculant for cowpea. Leader of the INCT Soil Biodiversity. Member of the Brazilian Academy of Science. (Source: Lattes Curriculum)