María, who started her career as a Research Assistant at the Latin American Fund for Irrigated Rice (FLAR, its Spanish initials) and is currently a member of the Phenotyping Platform team at CIAT, developed a method to establish different stages of infection in plants, and thus meet the increasing challenge faced by producers, caused by an outbreak of the Rice Hoja Blanca Virus (RHBV) that has been observed in recent years in rice plantations from different countries of Latin America and the Caribbean.
![Roughly the length of a finger, the insects fly together by the millions and devour crops. [Tiksa Negeri/Reuters]](https://storage.googleapis.com/cgiarorg/2024/04/Tiksa-Negeri-Reuters-640x428.png)