Afroditi obtained her Master’s degree in Advanced Experimental and Computational Biosciences at the University of Thessaly, Greece, in 2022, where she worked on plant-fungal transkingdom RNAi. During her studies she participated at the iGEM competition, a worldwide synthetic biology competition, as a team member in 2019, a team advisor at 2021 and a team instructor at 2022. In 2022, she moved to Belgium and joined the research group of Prof. Dr. Sofie Goormachtig and started a PhD (FWO fellowship) under the supervision of Dr. Sylwia Struk, at the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology. Her research focuses on the interaction of nitrogen-fixing rhizobia and Soybean, and the regulation of the nodulation process. More specifically, her project concentrates on the final steps of the Autoregulation of Nodulation (AON) pathway and the Too Much Love (TML) genes of Soybean, and how they control nodulation.

Postdoctoral researcher

My journey in plant sciences integrates plant adaptation to environmental stress, redox mechanisms, and epigenetics. Trained at the University of Perpignan Via Domitia and the University of Toulouse Paul Sabatier in France, I developed expertise in molecular biology and genetics, laying the foundation for my research career. In October 2019, I commenced my PhD under Dr. Jean-Philippe Reichheld's supervision at the Laboratory of Plant's Genome and Development in Perpignan, France. Our research revealed redox mechanisms' significance in plant adaptation to heat waves and their impact on chromatin regulators, including histone deacetylases HDA6 and HDA19. After defending my thesis successfully in May 2023, I began my first postdoc in Prof. Dr. Frank Van Breusegem's lab at VIB-Ugent Center for Plant System Biology in Ghent, Belgium. My initial project focused on uncovering redox-sensitive proteins in the nucleus using redox proteomics. In April 2024, I secured the prestigious MSCA postdoc fellowship to initiate my independent research within the same team. This project involves developing new tools like genetically encoded redox proteomics probes and biosensors to investigate the role of redox regulation in stress granule formation during heat stress.