Photo credit: Unimedios
Professor Gustavo Buitrago Hurtado majored in Chemical Engineering at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá campus (1979, «Estudio experimental de una fermentación microbiana en forma continua») and holds an M.Sc. in Environmental Engineering (1988, tesis «Evaluación del tratamiento de la pulpa del café por fermentación en estado sólido») and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering (2003), also from Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
He is a professor at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, where he belongs to the Institute of Biotechnology (IBUN for its Spanish-language initials), which he cofounded and directed. He heads the GResearch Group on Yam Studies.
Professor Buitrago took office as the National Director for Extension, Innovation and Intellectual Property on 10 May 2018.