After finishing his bachelor degree in Farmaceutical and Biological Techniques at the Kaho Sint-Lieven hogeschool in Ghent, Jonah started his working career in the Molecular Pharming lab of professor Ann Depicker in 2006. Upon her retirement, he joined the Vascular Development group of professor Bert De Rybel in 2017 where he has been working ever since.

My name is Stijn and I live together with my wife and two sons on a small farm where we keep sheep and grow many crops. From very young I’m passionate about growing plants. Hence my choice to study Biotechnology after seeing small plants growing in in vitro tubes. I graduated at the KATHO Roeselare in 2008 with a professional bachelor degree in Biotechnology. Next, I started to work at PSB, first setting up a maize transformation protocol together with my colleague Griet. Once we got it to work, we applied this as a service for in house groups and later other labs and companies within Europe. Transforming immature maize embryos, subculturing calli, testing small gene-edited plantlets by PCR and sequencing, growing the plants until seeds, and training students are all part of my daily work package. It is this combination of lab and greenhouse work that I find fascinating in this job!

Dirk Inzé is a global leader in plant biology and an ISI ‘most cited author’. His research ambition is to obtain a holistic understanding of the molecular networks regulating plant organ growth and crop productivity. His work has opened up new perspectives for the identification of optimal growth regulatory networks that can be selected by advanced breeding, or for which more robust variants can be obtained through genetic engineering. As such, Dirk Inzé's work significantly contributes to providing food security for the growing world population.
Dirk Inzé received his PhD at Ghent in 1984. In 1990, he was appointed Research Director of the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA), where he initiated highly successful research programs on the plant cell cycle and growth control. In 1995, he became Professor at Ghent University and he was the scientific founder of the biotechnology company CropDesign, which was established in 1998 and acquired in 2006 by BASF Plant Science. In 2002, Dirk was appointed Director of the Center for Plant Systems Biology of the VIB. Under his directorship, the Center for Plant Systems Biology – currently employing approximately 300 individuals – became one of the world leading centers for advanced plant sciences. Dirk’s research was recognized by numerous awards and he is a member of several science advisory boards. Dirk currently owns, for the second time, an advanced ERC grant and his work received >56,000 citations (H-factor 132). In 2017, Dirk was awarded with the prestigious World Agriculture Prize. In 2019 he was elected to the rank of AAAS Fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In 2020 he became an elected member of Academia Europaea.

In 2021, I graduated with a Master of Science in Biology from Ghent University. My thesis, conducted at the Rhizosphere lab, focused on identifying bacteria capable of assisting lettuce in coping with cold stress. Following graduation, I joined the Lab of Microbiology under the supervision of Professor Anne Willems at Ghent University with Professor Sofie Goormachtig of the Rhizosphere lab as my co-supervisor, contributing to the 'Soja in 1000 tuinen' project. Here, I participated in a large-scale isolation campaign aimed at discovering rhizobia strains within soybean root nodules capable of nodulating soybeans at northern latitudes. Subsequently, in 2022, I obtained an FWO grant to investigate the underlying mechanisms behind variations in nodulation efficiency among different Bradyrhizobium strains, with the goal of optimizing this interaction.