Maria Hernandez-Soriano is a postdoctoral researcher within the coordination team of the EJP Soil WISH-ROOTS project, funded by BBSRC in UK.

Maria obtained a PhD in Bioscience Engineering at KULeuven (Belgium) followed by a Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship at North Carolina State University (USA) and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Queensland. Throughout these positions, her research focused on soil processes, particularly carbon sequestration and nutrient bioavailability under contrasting land management. Her focus was on the implementation of advance spectroscopic techniques to advance our understanding of key soil processes such as carbon dynamics in soil at a microscopic scale.

Maria joined John Innes Centre in 2019 as a Daphne Jackson-BBSRC fellow with a project exploring biological nitrification inhibitors in wheat roots and their potential to increase nitrogen use efficiency in wheat crop systems through modulation of nitrifying communities in the rhizosphere. Her work has resulted in the identification of genomic regions in wheat linked to control of microbial nitrifying communities. She is now leading the coordination team for the EJP Soil WISH-ROOTS project. The project aims to identify functional and morphological wheat root traits linked to soil microbiome functions and soil structure to advance sustainable wheat production and enhance soil health.