Elena obtained her PhD in 2021 under the supervision of Dr. Pilar Cubas at the National Centre for Biotechnology (CNB-CSIC) in Madrid, Spain. Her research focused on strigolactone signalling in Arabidopsis, specifically studying the degradation of the strigolactone receptor AtD14 and its role in plant development. After completing her PhD, she joined Prof. Inge De Clercq’s lab, which focuses on Inter-organelle Stress Signalling, as a postdoctoral scientist. Currently, Elena holds a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship, aiming to unravel the interactions between chloroplasts, the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), and mitochondria, with the goal of identifying the complex molecular mechanisms involved in inter-organelle communication.

I obtained my master’s degree in Biochemistry and Biotechnology at the Ghent University in 2021. During my thesis I worked in the Pauwels lab on the combination of doubled haploid breeding and multiplex gene editing in maize. Later that year, I joined the group of Dirk Inzé and Hilde Nelissen where I worked on the BREEDIT ERC project, with a focus on genotype-phenotype correlation in multiplex edited maize lines. In 2022, I obtained an FWO PhD fellowship and joined the Pauwels lab again. The main focus of my PhD is to improve regeneration in maize with the goal to expand the number of transformable maize inbred lines, while also developing gene editing strategies.