Jean Franco Castro is a Bioengineer from the University of Concepción and a PhD in Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology from the University of Chile. During his PhD he completed an internship in the Molecular Microbiology laboratory at the John Innes Center in the UK, where he worked on Streptomyces genetics and genome mining. From 2015 to 2018, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the areas of bacterial taxonomy and metabolic profiling of microorganisms, at the Center for Biotechnology and Bioengineering of the University of Chile, and at the Universities of Newcastle and Aberdeen in England and Scotland, respectively. Since September 2018, he has been Curator of the Chilean Collection of Microbial Genetic Resources (CChRGM) of INIA Chile. He has published more than 25 scientific articles and, currently, his lines of research are focused on the purification of INIA's CChRGM, on microbial taxonomy and plant microbiota for the development of biotechnological inputs that contribute to sustainable agriculture. .