Ursula Gonzales-Barron, a Peruvian-Irish national, is a Food Engineer (Honours graduated) with a PhD in Biosystems Engineering from University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the School of Chemical Engineering in the University of Manchester (UK), she became Senior Researcher at UCD (2006-2012), and is currently Principal Investigator at the CIMO Mountain Research Centre, IPB, Portugal. She leads the Food Quality and Safety Analytics research team, made up of $10$ young researchers. Her current research focuses on predictive microbiology, meta-analysis, microbial risk assessment, sampling plans and Bayesian statistics. She is also a Visiting Professor at the National Agricultural University La Molina, Peru. She has published $80$ peer-reviewed articles, has disseminated her work at $>45$ international conferences, and has taught/organised $15$ international symposia/workshops. She holds an H-index of $22$, has published with ~$90$ co-authors and her work has been cited ~$1000$ times. She currently acts as Editor of the journal LWT, and Secretary of the International Committee on Predictive Modelling in Food (ICPMF). Dr. Gonzales-Barron speaks fluently English, Portuguese and Spanish.