Sanja Baric is an Associate Professor of Plant Pathology at the Faculty of Science and Technology of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Italy) since September 2016. After the award of the doctoral degree at the Leopold-Franzens University of Innsbruck (Austria) in 2001, which focused on molecular evolution, she worked at the Laimburg Research Centre for Agriculture and Forestry for more than 14 years. From the academic year 2002/2003 to 2014/2015 she also taught at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano as a contract lecturer. At the Laimburg Research Centre, she was responsible for the establishment of the Molecular Biology Laboratory, which became operative in 2002 and which she headed until her sabbatical leave in 2011. She spent a one-year sabbatical in the group for Environmental Microbiology at the University of Warwick (United Kingdom) headed by Elizabeth Wellington as a Sponsored Visiting Research Fellow. Returning to the Laimburg Research Centre, she was in charge for the Division of Population Genetics and the development of a database for molecular genetic determination of apple cultivars until December 2014. From January 2015 to January 2016, she became head of the Laboratory for Microbiology, Virology and Diagnostics, and was responsible for the operational management and organization of the plant disease diagnosis service. In February 2016, she accepted a call for a professorship (W2) in Agricultural Biotechnology from the University of Applied Sciences–Hochschule Osnabrück, where she taught until July 2016.
Her research interests in the field of plant pathology cover population structure and diversity of plant pathogens of crop species, their interaction with host plants and epidemiology of plant diseases, as well as the development and implementation of new techniques for plant disease diagnosis and investigation, in particular based on molecular tools. Her current research focuses on molecular genetic characterisation of subpopulations of the chestnut blight fungus (Cryphonectria parasitica), its hypovirus and its host plant, and diagnosis and characterization of postharvest pathogens of apple. She is (co)-author of more than 50 peer-reviewed scientific publications and of four book chapters, and made more than 70 contributions to scientific conferences. In addition, she has co-authored more than 30 contributions in specialist journals.
