I have obtained my Master in Biology-Plant Biotechnology at Ghent University (1992) and my PhD under the supervision of Geert Angenon and Marc Van Montagu at the Laboratory of Genetics, Ghent University (Belgium, 1998), studying plant seed storage protein synthesis. During my PhD, I have also been a visiting researcher at CIAT in Cali (Colombia) in the group of César Cardona. After obtaining my PhD degree, I moved to the lab of Ramón Serrano at the IBMCP-UPV in Valencia (Spain) as a Marie Curie EU postdoctoral fellow to work for 2 years on yeast salt tolerance. I returned to Belgium afterwards and started my own research group within the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology in 2003, focusing on jasmonate signaling, gene discovery in plant specialized metabolism and metabolic engineering. I am experienced in yeast and plant functional genomics, molecular biology and applied biotechnology. My current research aspires to understand jasmonate signaling in model, crop and medicinal plants and unravel the mechanisms that steer plant growth and metabolism in response to developmental and environmental cues. Doing so, I hope to find novel tools for plant metabolic engineering. I have been appointed as a part-time Full Professor at Ghent University in 2015 and I am teaching ‘Metabolic Engineering’. Since 2015 I have been included in the Thomson Reuters list of ISI Highly Cited Researchers in Plant & Animal Sciences. In 2020 I have been elected as an EMBO member.
