Prof. Beatriz Ofelia Saidman

Nationality
Argentina
Programme
SMART LOIRE VALLEY GENERAL PROGRAMME
Period
April, 2022 - June, 2022
September, 2023 - November, 2023
Award
LE STUDIUM Guest Researcher

From

Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences, University of Buenos Aires - AR

In residence at

BioForA, Centre INRAE Val-de-Loire / ONF - FR

Host scientist

Dr Philippe Rozenberg

BIOGRAPHY

Beatriz O. Saidman is Associate Consulting Professor of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and Member of the Argentinian National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET). She has been teaching for 40 years at the UBA, in the courses of General Genetics, Evolution and Theoretical Systematics. Her specialty is population genetics and evolution in forest trees and shrubs of arid zones of Argentina. She received different fellowships from CONICET, Department of Genetics of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and UNESCO. Beatriz Saidman carried out scientific visits to the Department of Genetics, Faculty of Biological Sciences of the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain) and the Institute of the Agricultural Research (INRA) Orleans, France. She founded and directed the Laboratory of Evolutionary Genetics of Woody Species (GEEL) of the Department of Ecology Genetics and Evolution (UBA). She directed more than 30 PhD and graduation theses and has been member of the evaluation committee of many PhD theses. She was Vicepresident of the Argentinian Society of Genetics (SAG) and member of CONICET Evaluation Commities. Beatriz Saidman has written 14 chapters of scientific books and published 74 articles in scientific international journals.

PROJECT

Adaptive strategies of forest trees to climate changes: Microevolution and Plasticity

 

The objective of this project is to coordinate and implement an integrated study of the genetic and plastic adaptation to climate of an important forest tree species, European larch. The study will combine powerful and recent population and quantitative genetics methods with data collected on an integrated multidisciplinary experimental trial installed by INRA along an altitude gradient in the French Alps. This experimental trial gather permanent forest plots with reciprocal transplant experiments, dendroecological phenotyping and microsatellite and SNP genotyping of the trees in the permanent plots. This integrated trial provides the opportunity to improve the quantification and the separation of the effects of phenotypic plasticity and genetic adaptation on the past and present response of European larch to climate variation. In this context, the role of Pr JC Vilardi will be to direct and harmonize all components of the ecological genetic and genomic analysis with the project partners.