Alvaro Furones studied Biotechnology at University of Salamanca, Spain. After that he moved to Belgium to study the Master of Biotechnology and Biochemistry at Gent University. For his Master thesis he worked on characterizing the structural aspects of Themis2, a protein involved in T-cell differentiation. Since 2023 he joined the advanced live cell imaging group where he is working on unraveling the structural and functional basis of the TPLATE complex.

Staff scientist

Thomas Eekhout graduated as a Master in Biochemistry and biotechnology at Ghent University in 2013 before starting his PhD on plant cell cycle regulation in the group of prof. Lieven De Veylder. After obtaining his PhD in 2018 he did a short postdoc in the same group, after which he joined the plant single cell platform of prof. Bert De Rybel in the summer of 2020. Since then, he has loaded and analyzed over two hundred samples from over 20 species for both internal and external groups on different single cell technology platforms.

Hongyan achieved a master degree in botany in 2022. Afterwards, she started her PhD project at PSB in October, in the Functional Phosphoproteomics group, where she is guided by Ive De Smet. Currently, she focused on the roles of ABA in high temperature adaptation in Arabidopsis. At this stage, she has mainly explored the cooperative function of kinase, phosphatase and transcription factors.

Claire has obtained her Master degree in Plant Biology and Plant-Microbe Interactions at Paul Sabatier University, France, in 2019. She did her Master thesis at the Plant Science Research Laboratory (LRSV) under the supervision of Dr. Grégory Vert, where she investigated the molecular mechanisms mediating the endocytosis and the endosomal trafficking of the Arabidopsis root iron transporter IRT1 and their functional relevance in plant nutrition. In August 2020, she started her PhD research in the lab of Dr. Jenny Russinova to work on cell polarity and asymmetric cell division in Arabidopsis thaliana.

Jonas De Backer graduated in 2019 as Master of Bioscience Engineering: Cell and Gene Biotechnology (Bio-engineer) at the faculty of Bioscience Engineering at Ghent University. During his master thesis under the guidance of Prof. Monica Höfte and Dr. Inge De Clercq at the Oxidative Stress Signaling group of Prof. Van Breusegem, he was involved in the study of the post-translational activation of transcription factors involved in retrograde signaling of plant stress responses. On the 1st of January 2020, he started his PhD in the EOS project Retrograde Arabidopsis Chlamydomonas Thiol signaling (ReACTs) to further study this topic while applying for an FWO predoctoral fellowship for fundamental research which he obtained that same year. Now he is doing his joint PhD entitled “Identification of proteases that activate membrane-bound transcription factors during mitochondrial retrograde regulation“ in the inter-organellar signaling lab of Prof. De Clercq in collaboration with the lab of Prof. Monica Höfte (Lab of Phytopathology, Ghent University) and the lab of Prof. Frank Van Breusegem (Lab of Oxidative Stress Signaling, PSB VIB-UGent).