Marta joined the Strawberry Research Group as a project scientist in Spring 2022. She obtained her BS in Bioengineering in 2009 from Rice University, where she worked in the lab of Bonnie Bartel on peroxisome function. She went on to a PhD in Horticulture and Agronomy (2016) at UC Davis, where she worked with Katie Dehesh and Abhaya Dandekar on the plant General Stress Response, a rapid and transient reaction to environmental changes. She completed a Marie Curie-funded postdoctoral fellowship in the Cyril Zipfel lab, where she studied plant transcriptional response to pathogen infection. In the Strawberry Research Group, she is working on understanding the molecular basis of key strawberry traits, including disease resistance and flowering time.