Michiel Vandecasteele obtained his PhD in Bioscience Engineering at Ghent University in 2019. During his PhD, he studied the occurrence, genotypic diversity, and the mode of action of pathogenic Alternaria species on Flemish potato fields, while also performing educational tasks as an assistant. In 2020, he returned to the Rhizosphere group as a doctor-assistant since he performed his Master's thesis in the same group eight years prior. Now, he investigates the action of drought-tolerance-inducing rhizobacteria on maize plants.

Thomas obtained his PhD from the University of Georgia with Wayne Parrott, developing several molecular tools for soybean biotechnology. In 2014 he moved to the lab of Greg Martin at the Boyce Thompson Institute for his postdoc. There he started developing CRISPR screens in plants. In 2016 he started the Plant Genome Editing group at the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology. In 2022 he was appointed Associate Professor at the University of Gent. His group is focused on developing easy-to-use genome editing systems for all kinds of plant species, specifically focused on making large-scale gene knockouts and base editing.