Professor María del Refugio Rocha Pizaña investigates the nutraceutical compounds present in food and plants, and their role in cancer and other diseases. She belongs to the Functional Foods and Nutriomics Research group, and one of her lines of research consists of discovering new compounds in plants from Puebla and Veracruz, capable of activating cell death pathways in cancer cells.
She belongs to the ethics committee of the Technological animal farm (CICUAL), to the Mexican Society of Immunology, and is a member of the National System of Researchers (SNI) as level I.