I am leading the Functional Phosphoproteomics group at VIB since 2013. My long-term goal as a researcher is to explain how plants develop and adapt to environmental changes. I am interested in conserved cellular phosphorylation-driven signaling mechanisms orchestrating warm temperature-mediated growth responses in plants. In the future, I will go beyond cataloguing dynamic changes in phosphorylation, and explore the functional role of conserved phosphorylation events and start visualizing signaling networks for which we will validate the connection between kinases/phosphatases and their substrates.
 
During my PhD at VIB-UGent with Tom Beeckman (2001 – 2006) [including research visits to University of Leeds (UK) and Duke University (USA)], I contributed to our understanding of lateral root organogenesis. From 2006 – 2010, I joined the lab of Gerd Jürgens (Germany) as a postdoctoral research fellow funded by EMBO and Marie Curie Fellowships, focusing on early embryogenesis and auxin signaling. From 2011 – 2015, I established my first research group at the University of Nottingham (UK), funded by a prestigious BBSRC David Phillips Research Fellowship and focusing on small peptide and receptor kinase signaling in plant development. In 2013, I returned to VIB (Belgium) and established my second research group. Since then, I started to explore phosphorylation-mediated signaling during abiotic stress, using an up-to-date workflow to capture protein phosphorylation proteome-wide. In 2014, I became a UGent professor. Finally, I recently developed a completely new research program, focusing on temperature signaling.
 

We study the evolution of genes, genomes and (polyploid) organisms

Yves Van de Peer is Full Professor at Ghent University and Science Director of the VIB, Center for Plant Systems Biology (Ghent, Belgium). He obtained his PhD in 1996 at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. After a postdoctoral fellowship with Axel Meyer at the University of Konstanz, Germany, he was hired at Ghent University (BE) as Group Leader of VIB (Department of Plant Systems Biology) in 2000 and as an Associate Professor at Ghent University in 2001 and promoted to Full Professor in 2008. Yves Van de Peer’s research group is considered a genome analysis powerhouse specialized in the study of the structure and evolution of (plant) genomes. Because of their unique expertise and experience in gene prediction, genome annotation, and genome analysis, his research group has been, and still is, involved in many international genome projects. Yves Van de Peer is particularly interested in the study of gene and genome duplications as well as in the evolution of novel gene functions after duplication. Yves Van de Peer published more than 550 papers, many of which in high-profile journals such as Nature, Nature Genetics, Nature Reviews Genetics, Science, PNAS, Genome Research, and The Plant Cell. Yves Van de Peer has an H-index > 135 and his work has been cited more than 90,000 times (google scholar). For many consecutive years, Yves Van de Peer has been a Highly Cited Researcher. In 2013, Yves Van de Peer received an ERC Advanced Grant entitled “DOUBLE-UP: The evolutionary significance of genome duplications for natural and artificial organism populations”, and in 2018 another one entitled “DOUBLE-TROUBLE: Replaying the ‘genome duplication’ tape of life: the adaptive potential of polyploidy in a stressful or changing environment”. Yves Van de Peer has been Organizer and Chair of the bi-annual international Current Opinion Conference on Plant Genome Evolution, held in 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019. In 2019, Yves Van de Peer also organized the triannual International Conference on Polyploidy, Ghent, Belgium. Yves Van de Peer is a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts (KVAB; since 2012) and serves on the Editorial Boards of five international journals (The Plant Journal, PeerJ, Genome Biology and Evolution, Current Plant Biology, Frontiers in Genetics). Yves Van de Peer is also part-time professor at the Department of Biochemistry, Genetics and Microbiology, at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, and at the College of Horticulture at Nanjing Agricultural University, China.