Marcos Paradelo Perez

Dr Marcos Paradelo Pérez BSc, MSc, PhD

Fellow in Soils

Dr Marcos Paradelo Pérez joined University of Greenwich in 2020, moving from Rothamsted Research where he was working on the strategic programme ‘Soil to Nutrition’ focus on understanding microorganisms’ interactions with the soil structure under different soil managements.

After graduating with a BSc in Agricultural engineering and a MSc in Agriculture and Food Science and Technology from University of Vigo, Spain, Marcos obtained his PhD degree in 2012 at the same university. He used for the first time the colloid filtration theory to describe the transport and fate of colloidal pesticide formulations through soil that were widely used in Galician (NW Spain) vineyards.

From 2013 to 2018 he carried his postdoctoral research at the Department of Agroecology, Aarhus University, Denmark. He investigated how soil structure controls soil ecosystem functions, using X-ray CT scanning techniques to predict the movement of water, solutes and colloids through soil. He also studied the changes in soil microbial communities under different soil physical environments and anthropogenic factors. He found that the changes in bacterial communities after herbicide applications is mitigated in soils with higher soil organic matter.

Marcos is always looking for the newest techniques applied to soil science. Together with other colleagues, he has used medical and industrial scanners and other visualization techniques to describe soil architecture, vis-NIR spectroscopy and multivariate models to estimate the partition coefficient of different chemicals in soil and he has got some experienced analysing metagenomic data to describe soil microbial communities. He has helped to developed fast response tensiometers to measure pressure jumps in structured soil during drainage to link pore-scale fluctuations to macropore/core scale fluctuations. Being inspired by frugal technology, he has used inexpensive colloidal tracers (sepia ink) to study colloidal transport in soil. Marcos is also very interested in crowdsourced / citizen science, being involved in testing a litter decomposition method using commercial tea bags.

In 2019 Marcos has been leading a project to create a new farmer-centric platform to monitor soil conditions and benchmark soil health. This project has been selected by ConceptionX, a programme for building deep tech startups from leading research labs and PhD programmes around the UK.

Marcos is a member of NRI's Agriculture, Health & Environment Department, mainly working under the Sustainable Agricultural Intensification Programme within the NRI’s Food and Nutrition Security Initiative, FaNSI.

A full staff profile can be seen on the Natural Resources Institute website.