Educational Background and Early Career: Interview with Daniela Vergara, PhD
Daniela Vergara, PhD, shares her journey into how she first began as an evolutionary biologist before switching over to cannabis.
Sebastian Krawiec: Dr. Vergara received her bachelor's degree from the University of the Andes in Bogota, Colombia, and her doctorate from Indiana University Bloomington. She has extensive experience in teaching and research. Mainly in genetics and breeding programs, and her past work has focused on hemp production, predominantly in the Western United States, with numerous relationships as a consultant with bioscience and agribusiness firms. Dr. Vergara is also a lecturer at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as well as the founder and director of the Agricultural Genomics Foundation. Thank you so much for joining us today, Daniella.
Daniela Vergara: Thank you very much for having me Sebastian.
Sebastian Krawiec: It's a pleasure. So I want to start off by allowing you to tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and how you became interested in cannabis.
Daniela Vergara: I finished my bachelor's in in Colombia, at the time, I was working mostly with insects, vectors of diseases. I did a two year internship before moving to the US. Well, no, it wasn't a two year internship. It was like a six month internship, and then I got hired at the same place. So I was there a total of two years. Then I moved to the US to work in host parasite for evolution at Indiana University in Bloomington. When I was there, I realized that I was in an evolution program, and so I changed my title to evolutionary biologist. And when I graduated from Indiana, I did not want to know anything about host parasites anymore. It was an amicable divorce. Right now, things are good, and I read the papers and etc, but I don't do that anymore.
I moved to Colorado with my husband. At that time, we were still boyfriend and girlfriend, but we had this agreement that he would wait until I finished my my PhD, and then we would move wherever he wanted to move, and maybe planting closets were involved. We decided to move where you do not necessarily needed to have them in the closet anymore, which Colorado was one of the places. So we moved to Denver, and I started doing a postdoc there in genomics and bioinformatics, and it was going to be originally sunflower genomics and bioinformatics, which, because of legalization, turned out to be cannabis genomics. While I was there, I realized all of the things that were still missing in cannabis science. So there were many things that I did in general, data analysis, but yes, I started working for the industry and consulting for the industry. Steep hill was one of the biggest companies that I was involved with for about two years, and then I was part of a merge that was between Steep Hill and Front Range Biosciences. So I also worked about for another two years with Front Range Biosciences. And then things happened during COVID, and I ended up moving to New York State, to upstate New York. I live in the Finger Lakes region, and I work for Cornell Cooperative Extension, and I am the hemp specialist.
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