About Franco Forlano Bo

Franco Forlano Bó is a PhD candidate working on an EU project - BlueAdapt, which is focusing on the impact of climate change on pathogenic risks in recreational waters. He has a background on both medical and environmental microbiology.

On his current PhD, Franco studies what are the current state of Vibrio bacteria in Dutch bathing waters. These bacteria, although mostly non harmful, can create skin and ear infection, as well as gastric diseases. The focus of the study relies on how measure Vibrio

abundance during different seasons using modern molecular methods, improving the current methodologies. At the same time, the project aims to find which abiotic (temperature and salinity) and biotic (chlorophyll and plankton abundance) factors play a role on the bacterial abundance, learning more on the ecology of Vibrio. The idea is to generate a dataset which could be turned into a prediction model