Leopoldo Naranjo-Briceño, Ph.D.

Growing up near the Simón Bolivar University (USB) in Caracas, Venezuela, I spent a huge part of my youth exploring their woods with my identical twin brother and friends. I and my family used to visit Bahia de Cata and my uncle’s farm every summer of every year, who was an agronomy engineer. All those adventures in the Caribbean sea and the wild fueled my interest in nature and when I graduated from high school I decided to pursue an Agronomy Engineering degree, which was realized between the Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV) and the Universidad Nacional Experimental “Francisco de Miranda” (UNEFM), in the beautiful Santa Ana de Coro City. While I was studying at the UNEFM, I did several research internships at the Soil Ecology Laboratory of the Center for Ecology and Environmental Sciences in the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research (IVIC), under the scientific direction of Dra. Gisela Cuenca. Also, I was a scholarship student for 5 years at the Research Center in Ecology and Arid Zones (CIEZA-UNEFM), under the scientific direction of Dr. Míriam Díaz de Arends. In both institutions, I studied deeply the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) to increase the succulent xerophytes Agave cocui plant productivity in arid and semiarid regions.

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I got successfully my degree and I was ready for whatever the future had in store for me, and that was moving to Spain to continue my Postgraduates studies. This was a journey that changed my whole life. An AECID scholarship granted by the Spanish government (Programa Mutis) gave me the unique opportunity to complete a European Doctoral Program degree in Molecular Biology and Biotechnology at the University of León (UNILEON), under the scientific direction of Dr. Juan Francisco Martín Martín, and, successively, I had the great opportunity to acquire a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the prestigious Institute of Biotechnology of León (INBIOTEC). This is how, 20 years ago, my journey as “a pioneer researcher in genetic engineering of filamentous fungi” began, in this case, discovering novel biotechnological products with interesting biological activities for human health. 

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Once I learned how to design novel biological systems and having the principles for successful management of the genetic information of microorganisms (bacteria, yeasts, and fungi), my contributions in the science and technology has been essentially focused on the rational use of the microbial and genetic diversity to develop environmental-friendly high added-value biotechnological products for a sustainable economy, which currently includes the use of the CRISPR/Cas9-based gene-editing system.

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Now, back to the present, I am working as a permanent professor and researcher at Ikiam (it means "jungle" in Achuar indigenous-language), a young and growing University that puts down roots in the heart of the Amazon rainforest in Tena, Ecuador, where I am living with my wife and our three beautiful daughters. In this “Avatar tree”, I am also the Director of the Microbial Biotechnology Lab, and the co-Director of the R&D Team on Applied Microbiology (MicApp).

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The last year 2019, an epic journey to San Francisco CA brought me the incredible opportunity to get to know MycoWorks’s inventors and its prodigious scientific team and share my work with them. Since that mystical moment, they extended me the opportunity to cooperate with MycoWorks in the development of improved non-GMO genetically engineered strains of Ganoderma lucidum through biological system engineering. Also, the biodiversity studies of autochthonous Ganoderma species in the Amazon rainforest, the most biologically diverse place on Earth, are coming.