Vanessa Lagos grew up in Bogotá, Colombia. Her interest in farming started at a very young age; her grandmother was born in a self-supply farm where Vanessa spent a large amount of time when she was a child. She pursued a BS in Animal Sciences at the National University of Colombia, Bogotá with a focus on Swine Production. As an undergraduate, Vanessa did an internship in ALIAR-LA FAZENDA, an agricultural enterprise dedicated to pork production, where she had the opportunity to learn about the handling and management of a swine farm. Vanessa came to Dr. Stein’s lab as a visiting scholar in 2015, and worked on some experiments related to energy and amino acid digestibility. Dr. Stein later accepted her as a student at the Division of Nutritional Sciences and in May 2018, Vanessa earned her Master’s degree with a thesis on the digestible calcium requirements by growing pigs. She then started her Ph. D. program, which focused on the influence of microbial phytase in pig diets on calcium requirements, post-weaning growth performance, phytate degradation, and nutrient digestibility. During her doctoral program, Vanessa did a 4-month internship at the Polytechnic University of Madrid under the supervision of Dr. Mateos, where she collaborated in a number of digestibility and growth performance experiments using broiler chickens and brown-egg laying pullets. She defended her Ph.D. dissertation in June 2021.

Vanessa currently serves as Monogastric Researcher at Schothorst Feed Research in the Netherlands.