Rate My Professor Cristina González

Cristina González Martín is an Assistant Professor (Profesora Ayudante Doctora) in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Pediatrics, Preventive Medicine and Public Health, Toxicology, Legal and Forensic Medicine, and Parasitology at the Universidad de La Laguna. She earned her PhD in Biology from the Universidad de La Laguna in 2014, with a thesis titled "Study of airborne viral particles associated with the influence of Saharan air intrusions in San Cristóbal de La Laguna, Tenerife," supervised by Dr. Basilio Valladares Hernández and co-supervised by Dr. Dale W. Griffin. Prior to her doctorate, she completed her Licenciatura and Master's degree in Food Safety and Quality at the same institution. Since 2009, she has been affiliated with the Instituto Universitario de Enfermedades Tropicales y Salud Pública de Canarias, where she directs the Laboratorio de Investigación Medioambiental. She teaches university courses since 2013, supervises undergraduate and master's theses, and participates in science outreach initiatives.

Her research focuses on aeromicrobiology, examining the global dispersion of pathogenic microorganisms via dust storms, particularly Saharan dust events, and their impact on air and health quality. Additional interests include wastewater reclamation using innovative membrane photobioreactors with microalgae-bacteria consortia, water quality in parasitology, and environmental microbiology. She has contributed to multiple projects, such as TECNOMAC for agro-food safety markers in Macaronesia, PID2021-125404OB-I00 on membrane bioreactors for resource recovery from wastewater, MICAS linking Saharan dust to asthmatic microbiomes, and international collaborations with NASA and Virginia Tech on dust-borne microbes. González Martín has published over 20 peer-reviewed articles, including "Airborne Bacterial Community Composition According to Their Origin in Tenerife, Canary Islands" (Frontiers in Microbiology, 2021), "Assessing conditions favoring the survival of African dust-borne microorganisms during long-range transport across the tropical Atlantic" (Environmental Science: Atmospheres, 2024), "Performance of a novel rotating membrane photobioreactor based on indigenous microalgae-bacteria consortia for wastewater reclamation" (Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, 2023), "The Global Dispersion of Pathogenic Microorganisms by Dust Storms and Its Relevance to Agriculture" (Advances in Agronomy, 2014), and "Impact of Saharan Dust and SERPINA1 Gene Variants on Bacterial/Fungal Balance in Asthma Patients" (International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 2025). She received a pre-doctoral fellowship from the Fundación Canaria Doctor Manuel Morales for international research stays.