Manuela Vanegas Ferro
Manuela Vanegas Ferro is a PhD candidate in Biological Design at Arizona State University. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology and Microbiology and a Master of Science degree in Computational Biology from Universidad de los Andes in Colombia. Manuela has experience in modeling complex biological systems at different scales. Currently, she is developing an individual-based model that integrates biological features of coffee rust disease and socio-economic aspects of coffee farmers' management practices to find optimal long-term farming strategies.
Session
Coffee Leaf Rust (CLR) is an aggressive plant disease of high economic importance that has caused major production collapses worldwide. To explore how the management and long-term planning of a coffee farm can influence CLR epidemic outcomes over several years, we took advantage of Julia’s multiple dispatch and distributed computing to develop and test an individual-based model of a coffee farm.