I did a bachelor in Biochemistry and Biotechnology in Ghent and got increasingly more interested in bioinformatics and the potential thereof. This led me to choose bioinformatics as major for my master, and eventually led me to this PhD position. I am mostly interested in answering fundamental questions about evolution. Especially, I am interested in learning how present genomes came to be and how they evolved through time. Genomes are impressively complex and diverse, and this intrigues me. Specifically, I study the role of Whole Genome Duplications (WGDs) in the establishment of complex genomes. For this, I mostly focus on duckweed as model system. My PhD position is a bit different from a conventional PhD. Besides my research project, I will also focus on some side projects such as maintaining this site. Because of that, my PhD will be longer.

I am a Post-doctoral researcher in plant cell and molecular biology in the field of organ growth, crop productivity. After I obtained my master degree of plant biology and biotechnology at Bordeaux university, I graduated with my PhD in 2022 where I studied the molecular mechanisms controlling Tomato fruit organogenesis and fruit size determination in the Flowering, Fruit Development and Environmental Constraints team at INRAe. My PhD consisted in studying the functional role of FW2.2, the protein associated to the major QTL governing fruit weight in tomato. I demonstrated that FW2.2 is associated with Plasmodesmata and is involved in cell-to-cell communication by modifying the callose deposition status, so that the aperture of Plasmodesmata is modified. Since October 2022, I joined the systems biology of yield and the innovative breeding groups to work on the EU-funded BREEDIT project which aims at developing a flexible pipeline that combines multiplex gene editing of genes related to growth and yield-traits and different crossing schemes to generate plants with modified traits. Taking advantages of BREEDIT, I am currently using multiplex genome editing to target Cis-regulatory regions of known negative growth regulators. My academic training and research experiences have provided me an excellent background in multiple domains including plant cell biology, molecular biology, genetic engineering and plant development. I had to adapt to different working environments and study different plant models (Tomato, Tobacco, Arabidopsis thaliana, Brachypodium distachyon and Maize) to carry out my work. I have gained expertise with a lot of different techniques such as molecular cloning (Gateway and Goldengate) and tomato transgenesis, multiplex genome editing using CRISPR/Cas9, Cis-regulatory regions targeting with CRISPR/Cas9, GUS staining, phenotyping, in situ hybridization and microscopy.

My career path

I am full professor at Ghent University and group leader at the VIB center of Plant Systems Biology in Belgium. I combine research and education because I think they cannot be separated and they strengthen each other. Hence, apart from my scientific activities, I am intensively involved in education and educational organization. 

My research career started in 1987 at the UGent focusing on how interactions between plant roots and neighboring organisms influence plant growth in a positive way.
Initially, the emphasis was on the symbiosis between legumes and rhizobia, resulting in the formation of new root organs, the nodules, in which the rhizobia reside and fix atmospheric nitrogen for the plant.  At that time, we studied the non-model symbiosis between the tropical legume Sesbania rostrata and the bacterium Azorhizobium caulinodans and could unravel the early signaling events and specific adaptations that have evolved to enable this peculiar nodulation upon water submergence. During my post-doc and early group leader career, we studied long-distance control of nodule organogenesis in the model legume Medicago truncatula and made significant contributions to understand how the nodule number is controlled.
During my early career, I went three times abroad for a prolonged period at the Laboratoire de Biologie des Sols, ORSTOM (Dakar, Sénégal) (Prof. Dreyfus), at the MSU-DOE, Plant Research Laboratory, Michigan State University (East Lansing, MI, USA) (Prof. De Bruijn) and at the ETH-Zürich, Institute of Plant Sciences (Prof. Potrykus), providing me both international connections and abroad research experience.

In 2005, I became professor at the Ghent University in the currently named Department of Plant Biotechnology and Bioinformatics. This department is also embedded in the VIB Center of Plant Systems Biology of the VIB. Since 2010, I am appointed full-time principal investigator of the Rhizosphere group at VIB. In my group, we still study the molecular communication between roots and rhizosphere microorganisms but the studies go beyond the rhizobia legume interaction as you can read from our web page. In 2017, I became full professor.

I find it very important that our basic research has valuable economic and societal relevance. Together with VIB colleagues, I am  very proud to have established the start-up Aphea.Bio (www.aphea.bio, 2017) focusing on the use of plant growth promoting rhizobacteria in agriculture. Recently, together with ILVO, I contributed to the start-up Protealis (https://www.protealis.com) aiming at the production of sustainable plant protein for Europe.

Timothy has a keen interest in space and biology. After having worked as a student in the Research and Development department of Colruyt Group on Vertical farming technology and hydroponics, his ambition to get further into academics grew. In 2020, he graduated as Master of Science in Biology at Ghent University. Following his master thesis, which focused on the a growth-promoting cytochrome P450 78A, he obtained an FWO-grant for a project that builds further on the same topic. His project focuses on unraveling the reaction catalyzed by CYP78A and clarifying its regulatory network, with the aim to acquire knowledge that can lead to the development of applications with beneficial effects on many agricultural crops in a non-GMO manner (e.g. a biostimulant). The project will function as a stepping stone for his future goals, which involve conducting biological research in the context of space.