Scientist Set To Join Fray Of Florida’s Citrus Fight
April 4, 2016 
Meet Liliana Cano, the newest recruit to help Florida citrus growers overcome pests and diseases.
Photo by Velma Spencer
To help the state’s citrus growers, the University of Florida has hired a new plant pathologist to join the staff at the UF/IFAS Indian River Research and Education Center (IRREC) in Ft. Pierce.
Liliana Cano was named assistant professor of plant pathology at IRREC following an international search for a scientist to join a team of UF researchers in their efforts to restore Florida’s citrus production region. Cano is a plant pathologist with 12 years of experience in plant-microbe interactions.
Cano’s new role will involve genome analyses of the most important pathogens affecting citrus in Florida toward the identification of key molecules secreted by these microbes and the elucidation of the mechanisms used by these pathogens to cause disease in citrus.
In addition to her research interests, Cano will develop and instruct a graduate-level plant pathology course. Cano has co-authored 33 articles published in national and international scholarly journals such as eLIFE, Science, Nature, PNAS, Plant Cell, Bio Med Central Genomics, Genome Biology, Molecular Plant Pathology, Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions, New Phytologist and the Public Library of Science-PLOS Pathogens.
An accomplished scientist, Cano’s work has been recognized with a number of honors including the 2011 Excellence in Science Communication Student Prize from the John Innes Center Foundation for having co-authored 12 publications during collaborations while completing her doctorate at The Sainsbury Lab in the United Kingdom; The Daiwa Adrian Prize in 2010, awarded by both Japanese and United Kingdom trade organizations for training and collaboration work with Japanese scientists in the use of genomics to understand plant-pathogen interactions.
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