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.

Staff scientist

Thomas Eekhout graduated as a Master in Biochemistry and biotechnology at Ghent University in 2013 before starting his PhD on plant cell cycle regulation in the group of prof. Lieven De Veylder. After obtaining his PhD in 2018 he did a short postdoc in the same group, after which he joined the plant single cell platform of prof. Bert De Rybel in the summer of 2020. Since then, he has loaded and analyzed over two hundred samples from over 20 species for both internal and external groups on different single cell technology platforms.