Maria Farcet, PhD Shire

Following her university education in the UK, where Maria obtained a BSc Honors in Applied Biology from the University of Greenwich and a PhD in Molecular Plant Pathology from the University of Nottingham, she returned to her home town of Vienna, Austria to join the group of Emmanuelle Charpentier at the Max F. Perutz Laboratories, University of Vienna. Maria started working on small, non-coding RNAs in human pathogenic bacteria which led to the description of the CRISPR/Cas9 system.

In 2008, she joined the Global Pathogen Safety group at Baxter (now part of Shire), under the lead of Thomas R. Kreil, focussing on newly emerging viruses that might be a concern for the safety of plasma products (e.g. West Nile virus, Chikungunya virus, Hepatitis E virus) and the verification of the model virus concept in virus reduction studies.