Coming from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, Polina Novikova joins the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology (PSB) as Principal Investigator and UGent as Associate Professor. At PSB, Polina heads the Ecological Genomics lab, which looks at the roots of polyploidy, organisms with a doubled (or higher) amount of genome compared to a ‘normal’ organism. Simon Tack, PhD student at PSB, asked her some questions.