Dr. Alfredo Herrera Estrella is a biochemical engineer, with a Genetics PhD from the State University of Ghent, Belgium (1990). His scientific work is versatile and diverse, covering fundamental aspects of fungal genetics and, more recently, covering the deciphering and study of complex genomes.

The importance of his achievements is shown in the main distinctions he has received throughout his scientific career: The Carlos Casas Campillo Award (1998), the Research Award of the Mexican Academy of Sciences (2000), the Agrobio Award in Biotechnology (2009), and more recently he has been named member of the Latin American Academy of Sciences (2021).

Dr. Herrera is a member of the National System of Researchers, Level III, being also part of the Mexican Consortium for Genomic Surveillance of SARS-CoV-2.

The participation of Dr. Herrera Estrella's group into structural and functional plant genomics studies has contributed to generate results of international caliber in the study of vegetable crops whose food importance is essential for the Mexican diet. The work of Dr. Herrera Estrella was fundamental in deciphering the genome of palomero maize, being one of the Cinvestav´s multidisciplinary team leaders that contributed to this discovery. Likewise, he directed and coordinated the international group of scientists that took on the task of deciphering the genome of the common bean.

His determination to show that discoveries of the highest international level can be generated from scientific practice in Mexico, as well as from the training of new researchers, is reflected in the publication of 114 original scientific articles in indexed journals, highlighting publications in Science, Nature, The EMBO J., Current Biology, Genome Biology, and PNAS. The impact of these publications is reflected in the Scopus platform in 6,736 citations and in Google Scholar in 11,953 citations, as well as an h-index of 49 (Scopus), and 59 (Google Scholar). He has directed 6 undergraduate, 18 masters and 30 doctoral thesis.

He is a founding member of the National Laboratory of Genomics for Biodiversity, Cinvestav (today the Advanced Genomics Unit).

His is also a scientific editor for many journals such as “Applied and Environmental Microbiology”, “Microbiology”, “PlosOne”, “Frontiers in Plant Science”, “Frontiers in Microbiology”, “Frontiers in Fungal Biology”, “Fungal Biology and Biotechnology” and “Eukaryotic Cell”.