Among his activities, Spiros N. Agathos, Ph.D., will plan a project to clean wastewater from the shrimp industry.

May 29, 2019

Spiros N. Agathos, Ph.D., Rector of Yachay Tech, had an academic cooperation agenda in Belgium during May 27 and 28, 2019. The purpose of his trip was to attend a doctoral thesis defense as a supervisor and design a budget plan for the ongoing research project RENEWABLE, which seeks to give greater sustainability to the shrimp industry. The visit to Belgium is the last of an international agenda that aims to find international allies to enhance Yachay Tech’s research.

During the first day of the agenda, the Rector attended the defense of a doctoral thesis that he supervised. The event was held in the facilities of the applied microbiology cluster of the Catholic University of Louvain, where Spiros N. Agathos, Ph.D., is professor emeritus. The project titled “Manipulation of biodiversity to study and optimize the function of the microbial community”, and it discusses the management of microbial communities, which is very important for the development of microbial genetics and genomics. This topic is one of the research priorities for the School of Biological Sciences and Engineering of Yachay Tech and for the Ecuadorian Network for Genetics and Genomics (ReGG in Spanish), of which the Rector is president.

On the second day of the agenda, Spiros N. Agathos, Ph.D., carried out the planning and budget for the RENEWABLE research project, in the Bioengineering laboratory of the same cluster. This project is about the use of algae for the cleaning of wastewater from shrimp farms, in addition to carrying out an evaluation of bioenergy and bioproducts. The purpose of this project is to contribute to the development of a more sustainable shrimp industry for Ecuador because this is one of the most important activities in the country. In this sense, Yachay Tech University conducts different projects that seek to benefit this industry from different angles.