Dr. Sandra Tirado was born and raised in Colombia. She is passionate about helping students across America; she has brought students from Latin America to North American universities, including Canada and the U.S.A, with proposals submitted to the Colombian science foundation – Colciencias-. Her awarded grants helped develop a technological and scientific alliance between Latin American and North American Universities and brought more than a dozen underprivileged students to North America.
Dr. Tirado is a Visiting Associate Professor of Biology at Ave Maria University and an Environmental Sciences and Microbiology adjunct at Florida Southwestern State College. She hopes to continue working collaboratively with faculty and students across countries to develop research and alliances to help improve the understanding of our environment and the gifts of Nature.
Before joining AMU, Dr. Tirado was a full-time Professor at Florida Southwestern State College, working with outreach programs at Moore Haven, LaBelle, and Clewiston in FL. She focuses on helping students construct knowledge through projects, hands-on activities, and lots of academic debate and discussion that allows vest dedicated students success. She believes that teachers are not primarily in charge of dispensing information but rather serve to monitor a structure where students can develop critical thinking skills to access, apply, and investigate relevant topics. Approximately 35% of her FSW student body qualified for free or reduced lunch.
Dr. Tirado obtained her B.S. in Microbiology from Pontifical Javeriana University in Colombia in 2003, her M.Sc. in Biological Engineering from The Ohio State University, and her PhD. in Environmental Sciences from the University of Guelph in Canada. After completing her graduate degrees, she served as a professor in Florida and has a bast teaching experience in higher education. Dr. Tirado taught in a variety of synchronous and asynchronous environments. She is familiar with teaching online, traditional, live online, and flex. She has served the student community by designing and implementing learning management systems in her classes. She has served as a science fair judge in Lee and Charlotte counties and has been an honorary guest speaker in Colombia, Canada, and Ohio.
Dr. Sandra Tirado's research experience includes working with microorganisms in water, soil, plants, and food. She completed her BSc in the Microbiology unit at Pontifical Javeriana University in Colombia, working with biofilms of Listeria monocytogenes and Pseudomonas sp in packages for the food industry. After her BSc, she earned a scholarship as a visiting scientist at Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center – OARDC – at The Ohio State University in Wooster- OH. During this period, she worked evaluating compostability and microbial communities of polymer-coated paperboard packing materials. While in Wooster, the Food Agricultural and Biological Engineering department recruited her to complete her M.Sc, working collaboratively with Colombian universities. At OARDC, she worked on the effects of turning frequency, pile size, and season on physical, chemical, and microbiological properties during dairy manure/sawdust composting and its impact on plant growth.
After her time in Ohio, she moved to Guelph. She worked conjunctly with the governmental institution of Environment in Canada and the Ontario Agricultural College at the University of Guelph to assess the energy regime impacts on pathogen-particle interaction linking water quality to ecosystems and public health completing her Ph.D. dissertation.
Dr. Tirado pursues completing research at AMU to cover areas such as the succession of native plants and invasive species, accumulation of various contaminants in native plants growing in polluted soils; economics of native plants in residential landscape designs; and plant, soil, and microbial interactions in residual leachate, among other topics.
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