Dr. Glaucia Souza is the President of the FAPESP Bioenergy Research Program BIOEN (https://bioenfapesp.org). The BIOEN Program currently has one-hundred and six projects conducted by more than three hundred researchers from fifteen countries. She is leading a global assessment on the sustainable expansion of bioenergy in the world to produce a synthesis of current status and recent technological innovations and their social, environmental and economic impacts. The synthesis will be used to produce a policy brief in collaboration with SCOPE, hosted at UNESCO.
Dr. Glaucia Souza is the Vice Coordinator of the National Institute of Science and Technology of Bioethanol, member of the International Society for Sugarcane Technologists Biology Committee, member of the Bioenergy and Sustainability Research Nuclei Council, leads the Biomass Systems and Synthetic Biology Center as part of the activities of the State of São Paulo Center for Bioenergy Research and is a member of the State of São Paulo Government Bioenergy Committee.
Dr. Glaucia Souza holds a degree from the Biosciences Institute of University of São Paulo (1988), PhD in Biochemistry at the Institute of Chemistry (1993), post-doctorate in molecular genetics at La Jolla Cancer Research Foundation (1994) and post-doctorate in molecular genetics at Baylor College of Medicine (1996). She is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Chemistry and leader of the Signal Transduction Laboratory. In 2003 she became coordinator of SUCEST project (aiming to sequence and annotate ESTs from sugarcane) and started the SUCEST-FUN initiative (http://sucest-fun.org) composed of a network of researchers dedicated to the functional analysis of the sugarcane genes and identification of genes associated with traits of agronomic interest. The activities of her group focus on the Transcriptome analysis, generation of transgenic plants and studies related to the investigation of regulatory and signaling networks. Genes associated with sucrose content, biomass, tolerance to drought, phosphate deficiency, herbivory, interactions with endophytic bacteria, climate change, sugars and hormones have been identified. Dr. Souza is developing the SUCEST-FUN database and bioinformatics tools for the integration of agronomic and molecular data for sugarcane and energy cane. Since 2003 she carries out research in collaboration with the private sector to change the energy metabolism of sugar cane and its potential to produce biofuels. She is an Eisenhower Fellow since 2009.