Virginia Aragon
Dr. Aragon is a biologist with extensive experience bacterial pathogenesis. During her scientific career, she has studied different virulence factors of several bacterial species. She completed her PhD at the University of Navarra (Pamplona, Spain) working with virulent strains of Brucella, mainly B. melitensis and B. abortus, under the supervision of Dr. I. Moriyón. During her doctoral studies, she purified and characterized native polysaccharides from the surface of these virulent bacteria. Her work provided her with the opportunity to continue her scientific career at three different universities in the USA. During her term at the University of Missouri-Kansas City as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. L. Dreyfus, she worked with the cytolethal distending toxin (CDT) of Escherichia coli. Later she moved to Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago. Under the guidance of Dr. N. Cianciotto in Chicago, Dr Aragon worked with Legionella pneumophila and defined several enzymatic activities secreted by the type II secretion system of this bacterium. At the final stage of her stay in the US, Dr Aragon joined the laboratory of Dr. E. Hansen at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (Dallas), where she performed site directed mutagenesis of Moraxella catarrhalis adhesin UspA1 and identified essential aminoacids for its function.
Dr Aragon joined the Centre de Recerca en Sanitat Animal (CReSA), Barcelona, in 2003 and established herself as a leading scientist in the research line of respiratory bacterial infections of swine. Currently Dr Aragon is involved in the genomic and functional characterization of the swine pathogen Haemophilus parasuis. In the last years she has extended her research focus to unravel molecular mechanisms and components responsible for H. parasuis pathogenesis. Her scientific achievements are published in peer-reviewed international journals in the areas of Microbiology and Veterinary Medicine and are also divulged to clinicians and producers in technical talks.
Her research is mainly funded by competitive grants from the Spanish Government.
Abstracts this author is presenting: