Contact Mahassine Arhazzal

Background

Mahassine graduated in 2017 from the National School of Agriculture of Meknes in Morocco with an agronomic engineering degree. She undertook her graduation project at the National Institute of Agronomic Research (INRA-Morocco) where she worked on the optimization of the micropropagation techniques of date palm in the face of Bayoud disease in the moroccan oasis. After her graduation, Mahassine worked as a production manager in a date palm tissue culture laboratory. She was also a journalist for an agricultural news-magazine before joining University Mohammed VI Polytechnic (UM6P) as a lab manager for a year.

Mahassine is now a PhD student based at Rothamsted Research as part of the Rothamsted-Cranfield-UM6P partnership.

Current activities

Mahassine is interested in describing the microbiome of wheat and maize cultured in contrasting soil types and management regimes as well as assessing its potential to boost crop production. This will be achieved using next generation sequencing methods (culture-dependent and independent), alongside methods to determine thermodynamic efficiency and catabolic capabilities.