My bioresume

I have obtained my Master in Biology-Plant Biotechnology at Ghent University (1992) and my PhD under the supervision of Geert Angenon and Marc Van Montagu at the Laboratory of Genetics, Ghent University (Belgium, 1998), studying plant seed storage protein synthesis. During my PhD, I have also been a visiting researcher at CIAT in Cali (Colombia) in the group of Cesar Cardona. After obtaining my PhD degree, I moved to the lab of Ramon Serrano at the IBMCP-UPV in Valencia (Spain) as a Marie Curie EU postdoctoral fellow to work for 2 years on yeast salt tolerance. I returned to Belgium afterwards and started my own research group within the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology in 2003, focusing on phytohormone signaling, gene discovery in plant specialized metabolism and metabolic engineering. My current research aspires to understand jasmonate signaling in model, crop and medicinal plants and unravel the mechanisms that steer plant metabolism in fitness programs to find novel tools for plant metabolic engineering and synthetic biology. I have been appointed as a Full Professor at Ghent University in 2015 and senior Full Professor in 2022. I have been mentoring over 45 master students, 35 PhD students and 25 postdoctoral researchers. Over 10 of my alumni have acquired leading academic positions as group leaders, professors or managers of core facilities at universities in Belgium and abroad. Since 2015 I have been included in the Thomson Reuters list of ISI Highly Cited Researchers in Plant & Animal Sciences. In 2020 I have been elected as an EMBO member.

Yajie embarked on her doctoral research study in the Functional Phosphoproteomics group, following the completion of her master's degree in 2022. Her current project mainly focuses on utilizing structural proteomics approaches to investigate protein structural changes in plants under high temperature stress. Additionally, she integrates phosphoproteomics to identify potential biosensors in plants under high temperature stress conditions.

Sonia obtained her PhD in Biochemistry and Biotechnology in 2022 in the group of Prof. Anne Willems (Laboratory of Microbiology, University of Gent) and Prof. Sofie Goormachtig (VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology). During her PhD, she studied the effect of low temperatures on the microbiome of two cold tolerant plants, Valerianella locusta and Poa annua, and the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. The aim was to identify bacteria able to alleviate cold stress in plants. She is now a postdoctoral scientist in the group of Prof. Sofie Goormachtig at VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology since 2023. As a part of the BOOSTER project, she investigates how drought shapes maize microbiomes to identify drought-enriched bacteria that might promote plant growth under this abiotic stress and understand their mode of action.