Expert in maternal-infant nutrition and health joins ISAPP board of directors
ISAPP is pleased to announce that Prof. María Carmen Collado PhD from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Valencia (Spain) is the newest elected member of its board of directors. Prof. Collado officially joined as a board member at the 2026 annual meeting earlier this month in Tokyo, Japan.
Prof. Collado has spent the past 25 years exploring in detail the interactions between diet, gut microbiota and health in mothers and infants. After obtaining degrees in Agricultural Engineering (2000) and Food Science and Technology (2002) from the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV), she completed her PhD before going on to do postdoctoral training at the Functional Food Forum (FFF) at the University of Turku, Finland. She briefly worked at the Complutense University of Madrid before joining the IATA-CSIC, where she now leads the MAINBiotics Lab.
Prof. Collado’s research has centered on establishing links between microorganisms, diet and health within the mother-infant dyad. Her work has contribute to changing the way human milk is understood as part of a complex biological system that helps shape infant development, both in early and later life.
Making use of cutting-edge metagenomic sequencing and computational approaches, her work has uncovered some of the ways that maternal nutrition as well as physiological conditions in pregnancy, delivery and lactation interact with the infant’s microbial community and potentially influence infant health. These results have opened up new opportunities for targeted biotic interventions. Prof. Collado is also expert in designing and characterising probiotic strains, and in evaluating how probiotics and other biotics can modulate the maternal-infant microbiome, immune development and health outcomes in a beneficial way.
Prof. Collado says, “I have really enjoyed being involved with ISAPP over the years, from a postdoc in the early days of ISAPP’s Students and Fellows Associations, and later, taking part in various scientific discussions and expert working groups, including the consensus definition of postbiotics. It is an honour to join the Board, and I look forward to supporting ISAPP’s mission of advancing the science of biotics to improve health.”
ISAPP’s President Maria Marco says, “María Carmen is an excellent addition to our board of directors. She has been a valued collaborator with ISAPP for a number of years, and we look forward to her contributions as we continue to fulfill our mission of advancing biotic science.”
ISAPP is governed by a volunteer academic group of board members who are actively involved in the many activities of the organization, leading discussion groups, publications, outreach initiatives and more.
