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Eline graduated from the Faculty of Sciences at Ghent University in 2021 with a Master in Biology, after which she continued her studies with a one-year Advanced Master in Plant Biotechnology. She performed her second Master thesis in the Vascular Development lab, where she subsequently joined to start a PhD in November 2022. Her project is embedded within the “PIPELINES” ERC Consolidator Grant (EU-funding) which was acquired by Bert De Rybel, and aims to discover novel transcriptional regulators in the process of vascular development through the use of single cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) data. By studying the scRNA-seq data of evolutionary diverged model species that contain a vascular system, she aims to find regulators in xylem and phloem which are evolutionary conserved.

Isabelle obtained her B.Sc in Pharmaceutical and Biological techniques in1997 at KaHo St-Lieven in Gent. She graduated in 1999 from the Larenstein International Agricultural College (Velp, Netherlands) as Industrial engineer in Laboratory Science with specialization in Plant Biotechnology. She worked for 2 years at Bayer Cropscience in the area of molecular assisted breeding of oilseed rape before joining the VIB in 2001. At the VIB, she first joined the group of Prof. G. Gheysen mainly doing whole-mount RNA in-situ hybridization of plant parasitic nematodes. After 2 years, she joined another group to check the presence of previously selected cDNA-AFLP tags in 50.000 genes of a MJM-treated BY2 cDNA library under supervision of Dr. Pierre Hilson and Prof. Alain Goossens. Subsequently, she worked on the identification of genes involved in sexual differentiation of P. monodon and the development of a genetic map of P. monodon in the group of Dr. Frank Van Breusegem. In 2007, she joined the group of Dr. Russinova and she is currently involved in research on brassinosteroids in Arabidopsis.
 

Ruben Vanholme is a staff scientist in the Bio-Energy and Bio-Aromatics group of Wout Boerjan.
Ruben graduated in 2004 as Master of Chemistry at Ghent University. He made a master dissertation in the Ghent Quantum Chemistry Group, under supervision of Patrick Bultinck. In 2005, he obtained an IWT grant to start his PhD in the Bio-Energy and Bio-Aromatics lab of Wout Boerjan. His research included the study of systems-wide consequences of lignin perturbations in Arabidopsis. For this, transcriptome and metabolome approaches were used. After obtaining his PhD degree in Biotechnology, he got two consecutive FWO post-doc grants to further investigate the lignin biosynthesis and engineering in Arabidopsis, poplar and maize. Meanwhile, he is staff scientist in the Bio-Energy and Bio-Aromatics lab as an expert in MS-based phenolic metabolite profiling and identification.
Ruben is actively involved in communicating science-based information about genetic engineering of crops. In addition, he is a climate warrior with a mission: to inform people on climate change and the dramatic loss in biodiversity it causes. He also informs what can be done to avoid further dramatic scenarios.