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My career path

I am both full professor at Ghent University and group leader at the VIB center of Plant Systems Biology in Belgium, combining guidanance of my research group with teaching and organizing of University education. Next to deciphering important scientific questions with my research team, it is my ultimate goal to use teaching to stimulate students into becoming the next generation of scientists that aim to find solutions for nowadays and future problems through applying a combination of fundamental and applied research.
 
Graduated as a chemist, I started my research career in 1992 at the UGent focusing on the development of new chemical-inducible gene expression systems for plants, but soon I became engaged in trying to understand the molecular control of the cell cycle. Using at that time the novel yeast 2-hybrid approach I was able to identify in the pre-genome era novel important key cell cycle genes and functionally characterized them. At a second stage of my career I started to map the role of these genes in plant developmental and physiological processes, including the control of the endoreplication cycle and the way plants adjust their cell cycle in response to DNA damage-inducing stresses. More recently we identified unique plant cell cycle regulators that are important in the gain of stem cell identity and study how these regulators help plants to regenerate from tissue damage. In parallel, in the frame on an intra-university collaboration we studied the cell cycle of diatoms, being are a major group of microalgae found in the oceans, waterways and soils.
 
During my late pre-doc and early post-doc career, I briefly spend time is the research facilities of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London (Prof P. Nurse) and the INRA Centre Versailles (Prof. D. Bouchez) to study the effect of plant cell cycle gene expression in yeast and to isolate T-DNA insertion mutants in cell cycle genes, respectively.
 
In 2008, I became professor at the Ghent University in the currently named Department of Plant Biotechnology and Bioinformatics. This department is also embedded in the VIB Center of Plant Systems Biology of the VIB. Since 2002, I am appointed full-time principal investigator of the Cell Cycle group at VIB. In my group, we still study the molecular mechanisms that drive plant regeneration following wounding or DNA damage-inflicted damage, where we expanded our knowledge from the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana to other plant species, including Marchantia polymorpha, maize and poplar. 
 

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.
 

Bert De Rybel graduated from the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering of Ghent University in 2005 before starting his PhD research in the group of prof. Tom Beeckman, focusing on early lateral root development. For his postdoctoral research, he moved to the lab of prof. Dolf Weijers at Wageningen University in early 2010 funded by Marie-Curie and FEBS postdoc grants. Here, he initiated work on early vascular development. He received a prestigious NWO VIDI grant to continue this line of research in an independent manner. Funded by an FWO Odysseus II and an ERC Starting Grant, Bert is currently heading the ‘Vascular Development’ lab within VIB; is associate professor at Ghent University and was elected EMBO young investigator in 2019. His group aims at integrating developmental, cell and evolutionary biology to understand how plant vascular tissues develop.