Maite Saura Sanchez

Maite earned her Bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology and her Master’s Degree in Plant Molecular and Cellular Biotechnology from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV). Following this, she relocated to Argentina to start her PhD at IFEVA (Buenos Aires), where she studied the role of BBX proteins in the shade avoidance responses in Arabidopsis thaliana. During this period, she also completed a Master’s degree in Bioinformatics and Biostatistics at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). In 2021, she joined Bert De Rybel's group to participate in a collaborative project with Tom Beeckman (PSB-VIB) and Tina Kyndt (UGent). Her current project aims to study the conserved mechanisms between dicots and monocots during de novo organogenesis processes in roots at the single-cell level.

Matilde Sanches graduated in 2017 as master of Biodiversity and Plant Biotechnology at University of Coimbra, Portugal. During her master thesis, under the guidance of Prof. Jorge Canhoto, she studied developmental epigenetics throughout somatic embryogenesis of tamarillo plant (Solanum betaceum, Cav.), performing experiments and developing skills (particularly immunofluorescence microscopy) at Pilar S. Testillano's lab in CIB-CSIC, Madrid, Spain. After a one-year experience as Project Developer - DIVA project (H2020) and SKAN Platform activities - at INOVISA (Lisbon, Portugal) and at the Centre for Investigation and Transference of Technology to Community Development (CITT - Maputo, Mozambique), she enrolled in the Plants for Life Doctoral Program in 2019, from ITQB NOVA (Lisbon, Portugal). During her PhD project, focussing on the study of quantitative genetics and mechanisms behind water stress tolerance in grass pea (Lathyrus sativus), she had the opportunity to foster a collaboration between Dr. Carlota Vaz Patto's lab (PlantX group, ITQB NOVA, Oeiras, Portugal) and Prof. Frank Van Breusegem'lab (Oxidative Stress Signalling group, PSB-VIB, Ghent, Belgium). Her main scientific interests are I&D in the agronomic sector, particularly stress resilience in plants, the genetics and epigenetics underlying it; and more important, the potential applications of that field of knowledge in crop improvement and breeding programs, with a particular fondness for orphan crops. More recent (but obviously related) passions are statistics, experimental design and data science, and it was in that framework that she recently joint Hilde Nelissen's Systems Biology of Yield group at PSV-VIB (Ghent, Belgium).

Jenny Russinova has studied Biotechnology in Sofia University, St. Kliment Ohridski and obtained her PhD at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. Subsequently, she performed postdoctoral studies at Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands in the lab of Sacco de Vries, where she worked on understanding the function, mechanisms of activation and the subcellular compartmentalization of plant receptor-like kinases called SERKs. In 2006, she started her own research group focusing on brassinosteroid signaling regulation in plants.