Editor-in-Chief
Olivier Hamant - RDP lab, INRAE, ENS Lyon, France
Dr Olivier Hamant is interested in plant morphogenesis. After a PhD in molecular genetics, he moved to more mechanistic endeavors, notably focusing on the biochemical and biomechanical bases of shape changes in plants. In the footsteps of Paul Green, he notably analyzed the contribution of mechanical forces in tissue shape changes and robustness. This question-driven work also entails extensive interactions with computational modelers to formalize and test hypotheses. He is currently leading the plant mechanotransduction and development team in the plant reproduction and development lab in Lyon. He has written around 80 scientific articles and reviews, notably on the role of mechanical signals in plants. He also holds secondary affiliations at the Sainsbury lab in Cambridge, UK and the Kumamoto University in Japan. In parallel, he is involved in several science & society projects on the anthropocene, in the frame of the Michel Serres Institute in Lyon.
Institute Advisor
Richard Morris - JIC, UK
Dr Richard Morris is a group leader in Computational & Systems Biology at JIC and Professor in Applied Mathematics. He is interested in a variety of biological problems, in particular those that can be reduced to physical principles and quantitative analyses. His primary research focus is on how plants communicate over intra- and intercellular distances, i.e. understanding how environmental stimuli are encoded as signals and how these signals are transmitted and decoded.
Preprint Editor
Enrico Scarpella - University of Alberta, Canada
Dr Enrico Scarpella is an Italo-Canadian Biologist. He earned a Ph.D. in Mathematics & Natural Sciences from the University of Leiden (the Netherlands) for his work on rice vascular development in the lab of Annemarie Meijer, Harry Hoge, and Herman Spaink. Enrico did his postdoc on Arabidopsis vascular development in the lab of Thomas Berleth at the University of Toronto. Since 2004, Enrico has been at the University of Alberta, where he is now Professor. His research, which uses Arabidopsis as a model organism, aims to understand how plants coordinate tissue cell polarity and how coordinated tissue cell polarity leads to vein formation.
Associate Editors
Daphné Autran - IRD Montpellier, France
Dr Daphné Autran is a senior scientist at the Institute for Research and Development (IRD) in Montpellier, France. Her research program focuses on plasticity and canalization in reproductive development in Arabidopsis as well as in sexual and apomictic crop species, and includes collaborations with both European and Latin American scientists. Dr Autran’s current projects include studies of organ growth and cell fate during early ovule formation, and epigenetic mechanisms controlling early embryogenesis.
George Bassel - The University of Warwick, UK
George is a Professor of Plant Computational Biology at The University of Warwick. His lab seeks to understand the form and function of plant organs. The functional relevance of cellular configurations and their capacity to process information are being quantitatively examined using network-based and computational approaches. This interdisciplinary “systems-based” approach lies at the interface between biology and computer science. George’s current research is investigating parallels in information processing architectures between plants and computers. He is a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute.
Eunyoung Chae - National University of Singapore, Singapore
Eunyoung Chae is Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore, Singapore. Her research area includes plant immunity, natural variation, trait evolution, and hybrid performances. The Chae lab utilizes genetic and genomic tools to investigate non-additive genetic interactions between plant immune components, and to develop a predictable model linking immune system diversity and growth traits, particularly in hybrid plants. She received Ph.D. in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale University and postdoctoral training at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology at Tübingen, Germany.
Eva Deinum - Wageningen University, Netherlands
Dr. Eva Deinum is Assistant Professor at Wageningen University. She works on biophysical modelling of plant cell biology, with plant cortical microtubules and plasmodesmata as current core interests. Charmed by the breadth of biology, she also uses various model formalisms to take findings to higher levels of organization, including the occasional excursion to evolutionary questions. Wherever possible, she closely collaborates with experimentalists.
Ingo Dreyer - Center for Bioinformatics, Simulations and Modelling (CBSM), Universidad de Talca, Chile
Ingo studied Physics at the University of Hannover, Germany and obtained his PhD in Biophysics and Plant Physiology at the University of Würzburg, Germany. After postdoctoral training in plant molecular biology at the CNRS/INRA in Montpellier, France, he worked in Potsdam-Golm, Germany (University of Potsdam / Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology) and got the Habilitation in Biophysics and Molecular Plant Physiology. He spent 4 months as a guest professor at the University of Talca, Chile, and then joined as a professor the Centro de Biotecnología y Genómica de Plantas (CBGP) in Madrid, Spain. In 2015, he accepted the call for a position as professor titular (full professor) at the University of Talca, at the Center for Bioinformatics, Simulation and Modeling (CBSM). During his career, Ingo has spent several additional short-term research-stays in Japan, Italy, France, and Colombia.
Ingo’s research centers on transport processes across cell membranes to get deeper insights into plant nutrition and electrical signaling in plants. He combines experimental and theoretical techniques to get a more complete picture of the investigated phenomena. The experimental techniques are a broad spectrum in molecular biology, electrophysiology, and biochemistry, while the theoretical techniques comprise computational and mathematical modeling and simulation methods.
Daphne Ezer - University of York, UK
Dr. Daphne Ezer is a lecturer in computational biology at the Department of Biology of the University of York. The biological focus of her work is centred on understanding how plants respond to abiotic environmental factors, such as temperature and light, in a time-dependent fashion. Her methodological work focuses on developing new statistical techniques and bioinformatics tools to analyse time series transcriptomic (and other next generation sequencing) data. Prior to joining the University of York, she was a Turing Research Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, the UK's National Centre for Data Science and AI. She has held previous positions in the University of Warwick Department of Statistics and the Sainsbury Laboratory in Cambridge.
Ali Ferjani - The University of Tokyo, Japan
Dr. Ali Ferjani is an Associate Professor at the Department of Life Sciences, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at The University of Tokyo, Japan. By applying forward and reverse genetics, molecular developmental genetics, and metabolomic approaches to the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, his research interests aim to elucidate the logics and the dynamic aspects of plant development, with a special emphasis on leaf size regulation and flowering stem development.
Christian Fleck - ETH Zürich, Switzerland
Christian is a physicist by training and is working for more than 15 years in the area of System Biology. He worked at Freiburg University, Germany, Wageningen University, The Netherlands, and is currently at ETH Zürich, Switzerland. His research focus is on quantitative and mechanistic understanding of regulatory circuits of biological networks. His research topics are interrelated and driven by the fundamental questions how complex networks are able to robustly and accurately carry out their physiological functions and how to obtain an understanding of the mechanistic relationship between genotype and phenotype.
Félix Hartmann - INRAE, France
Félix Hartmann is a research engineer at the French national institute for agriculture, food and environment research (INRAE). His research interests focus on plant development, especially secondary growth and tree acclimation to mechanical stresses. He has experience working on biophysical models at different scales to investigate the internal and external factors driving wood formation.
Yuling Jiao - Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology (IGDB), Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
Dr Yuling Jiao is a Research Group Leader at IGDB. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Chinese Academy of Science. The focus of his group is directed towards systems biology of shoot development, particularly postembryonic shoot meristem formation, and lateral organ patterning. His study involves a combination of transcriptome analysis, live-imaging, molecular genetics, and computational modeling. He currently served as the Country Representative at the Multinational Arabidopsis Steering Committee (MASC), and as President of the Chinese Society for Plant Organogenesis.
Iain Johnston - University of Bergen, Norway
Dr Iain Johnston is an Associate Professor at the University of Bergen. His research group combines laboratory and field experiments with mathematical modelling and bioinformatics to explore biological systems where random effects play an important role. Focus topics include the evolution and control of mitochondria and chloroplasts, responses of plants to elevated carbon dioxide, and the parameterisation and analysis of (stochastic) systems biology models.
Dorota Kwiatkowska - University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland
Professor Dorota Kwiatkowska is a professor in the Institute of Biology, Biotechnology and Environment Protection at the University of Silesia in Katowice. Her research focuses on mechanical aspects of plant development and organ function. Members of the Dorota group investigate mechanics of cell wall and plant growth combining biophysical, structural, and developmental perspectives.
Boon Leong Lim - University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Dr. Boon Leong Lim is an Associate Professor in the School of Biological Sciences of the University of Hong Kong. His current researches focus on carbon and energy flows in plants, photosynthesis, and plant organelle biology. He developed in planta biosensors for real-time bioenergetics studies, and adopted omics approaches (transcriptomic, sRNA, proteomics, and metabolomics) to study the relationship between energy and plant growth. He earned a DPhil degree from the University of Oxford.
Ari Pekka Mahönen - University of Helsinki, Finland
Dr Ari Pekka Mahönen is a plant development biologist working at University of Helsinki, Finland. After his Post-doctoral period in Ben Scheres lab (Utrecht University), he returned to Helsinki to establish a research program to study the development of vascular cambium in Arabidopsis thaliana root. He has been a tenure track group leader at the Institute of Biotechnology, University of Helsinki since 2011, and in June 2019 he was selected as HiLIFE tenure track Associate Professor.
Richard Morris - JIC, UK
Dr Richard Morris is a group leader in Computational & Systems Biology at JIC and Professor in Applied Mathematics. He is interested in a variety of biological problems, in particular those that can be reduced to physical principles and quantitative analyses. His primary research focus is on how plants communicate over intra- and intercellular distances, i.e. understanding how environmental stimuli are encoded as signals and how these signals are transmitted and decoded.
Naomi Nakayama - Imperial College London, UK
Dr Naomi Nakayama is a Senior Lecturer and Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College London. Her research interests and methodologies combine biomechanics, mechano-biology, and synthetic biology (and thus are very quantitative). She studies biological engineering of plant structures and their functional significance, integrating cell, developmental, and synthetic biology with static and fluid mechanical analyses. Main subjects of current research are slender structures like hairs, bristles, and shoot systems of the dandelion and Arabidopsis. She gained PhD in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology from Yale University in 2006 and started her own group at the University of Edinburgh in 2013 prior to moving to her current position in December 2019.
Akira Oikawa - Yamagata University, Japan
Akiko Satake - Kyushu University, Japan
Akiko Satake is a mathematical biologist at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan. Her research centers on employing mathematical and computational approaches to investigate the mechanisms governing the synchronization of plant reproductive cycles with their external environment such as day-night cycles and seasonal changes. She employs an interdisciplinary approach that integrates gene expression analysis, mathematical modeling, and fieldwork to study the evolution of plant life history and forecast future responses to climate change.
Enrico Scarpella - University of Alberta, Canada
Dr Enrico Scarpella is an Italo-Canadian Biologist. He earned a Ph.D. in Mathematics & Natural Sciences from the University of Leiden (the Netherlands) for his work on rice vascular development in the lab of Annemarie Meijer, Harry Hoge, and Herman Spaink. Enrico did his postdoc on Arabidopsis vascular development in the lab of Thomas Berleth at the University of Toronto. Since 2004, Enrico has been at the University of Alberta, where he is now Professor. His research, which uses Arabidopsis as a model organism, aims to understand how plants coordinate tissue cell polarity and how coordinated tissue cell polarity leads to vein formation.
Ross Sozzani - NC State University, USA
Dr Ross Sozzani joined NC State in 2013 as a Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence Program cluster hire in Synthetic and Systems Biology. As Associate Professor in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, Sozzani researches the molecular mechanisms that regulate stem cell fate specification and maintenance within the Arabidopsis root, and translates this knowledge to engineering plants with enhanced agronomic function using the tools of systems and synthetic biology. Her goal is to gain a coherent qualitative and quantitative understanding of stem cell maintenance at the system level. Collaborations with mathematicians, physicists and computational biologists led to new ways of integrating imaging tools with genome-wide approaches, along with the modeling of regulatory networks to monitor the function of biological circuits over time at a cellular resolution.
Lucia Strader - Washington University in St Louis, USA
Dr Lucia Strader is an Associate Professor of Biology at Washington University in St. Louis, and is a member of the National Science Foundation Center for Engineering Mechanobiology.
Her research interests include plant hormone biology, with a focus on auxin signaling, transport, and interactions with other pathways. Her lab has a particular interest in combining plant physiology, genetics, and biochemistry/biophysics to address open questions in the field.
Aurélien Tellier - Technical University Munich, Germany
Aurélien Tellier is a theoretical evolutionary biologist and assumes the position of associate professor of population genetics at the Technical University of Munich.
Aurélien’s area of research is to develop population genetics theoretical models to comprehend genome evolution at the population or species level, aiming to bridge evolutionary and ecological time scales and processes. He also explores the evolutionary mechanisms of plant adaptation to their environment, taking into consideration aspects such as different climatic conditions and resistance against parasites (bacteria, fungi, insects). The primary focus of his research is the study of plant-parasite coevolution and long-term seed dormancy in the soil. To study empirically the genes involved in these adaptations, the wild tomato species Solanum chilense endemic to South America is used as a model system. Aurélien studied agronomy, plant biology, genetics and statistics at ENITA (Bordeaux, France) and population genetics at INAPG (Paris, France). After having obtained his doctorate at the John Innes Centre (Norwich, UK) under the supervision of James KM Brown in 2007, he has spent five years as a postdoctoral research fellow at LMU Munich (in the group of Wolfgang Stephan) supported by a grant from the Volkswagen Foundation and the German Research Foundation, DFG.
Kirsten ten Tusscher - Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Professor Kirsten ten Tusscher currently heads a group in Computational Developmental Biology at Utrecht University, and was appointed full professor in 2018. Her recent work focuses on using multi-scale models to unravel the regulatory mechanisms underlying complex patterning processes in animal and plant development, their evolutionary origin and underlying logic. In plants she is particularly interested in the interplay between developmental patterning and environmental cues in building the root system. To build highly realistic models and validate predictions generated by them Kirsten closely collaborates with a large range of experimental biologists.
Sebastian Wolf - University of Heidelberg, Germany
Dr Sebastian Wolf is a biologist at the Centre for Organismal Studies (COS) at Heidelberg University, working on integration of extracellular signals and into the intracellular regulation of plant growth and development. His lab uses genetics, genomics and quantitative imaging to decipher how signalling pathways linked to the cell wall are involved in the maintenance of cellular mechanics, in the coordination of growth between cells, and in the adaption to environmental conditions. While using mainly Arabidopsis as a model, the lab is also interested in the regulation of cell wall and biomass accumulation in the genus Miscanthus, which harbours some of the most promising crops for a bio-based economy.
Minako Ueda - Tohoku University, Japan
Minako Ueda is Professor in Graduate School of Life Sciences of Tohoku University in Japan. The focus of her group is directed towards the molecular mechanism of plant ontology. She has extensive experience working on live-cell imaging of embryo development, as well as molecular genetics focusing on transcriptional network regulating pattern formation. She has published manuscripts on living dynamics of intracellular structures in the zygote, and development of novel molecules to visualize or regulate specific aspects of plant cell behaviors, such as cell cycle progression and proliferation.
Matias Zurbriggen - Heinrich Heine University, Germany
Matias is a Professor of Synthetic Biology at the University of Düsseldorf and Coordinator of the Research Area Synthetic and Reconstruction Biology at CEPLAS-Cluster of Excellence in Plant Sciences. His research interests deal with the design, engineering and implementation of synthetic biology approaches towards the control and understanding of signaling and metabolic networks with high precision, quantitative and high spatio-temporal resolution. In particular, he integrates the reconstruction of semisynthetic signaling and metabolic networks in orthogonal cellular systems with the engineering and broad use of optogenetics and biosensors in microbes, animals and plants to unravel networks function and develop biotechnological applications.
Yuan Wang, Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, CAS, China
Dr. Yuan Wang is a group leader at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, CAS, and the CAS-JIC Joint Center of Excellence for Plant and Microbial Science. Her research focuses on various aspects of RNA biology, including the functional and mechanistic insights of small non-coding RNAs, co-transcriptional regulation, and RNA cap - mediated epitranscriptome. Her group investigate these RNA-regulated processes in the context of plant developmental transitions and plant-microbe interactions.
Advisory Member
Elliot Meyerowitz - California Institute of Technology, USA
Elliot Meyerowitz is the George Beadle Professor of Biology, and a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator at the California Institute of Technology, where he has been on the faculty since 1980. Prior to joining the Caltech faculty he obtained an undergraduate degree in Biology from Columbia University, and graduate degrees in Biology from Yale University, following which he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
From 2000 to 2010 he was Chair of the Caltech Division of Biology. In 2011 and 2012, while on leave from Caltech, he served as the Inaugural Director of the Sainsbury Laboratory at the University of Cambridge.
The Meyerowitz laboratory studies the development of Arabidopsis thaliana, a widely used plant model system that his laboratory (and others) popularized beginning in the early 1980s. Current studies concentrate on the interrelated roles of mechanical and chemical signaling in plant morphogenesis.
Among Meyerowitz’s honors are the Genetics Society of America Medal (1996); the International Prize for Biology of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (1997); the Lounsbery Award of the National Academy of Sciences (1999); the R.G. Harrison Prize of the International Society of Developmental Biologists (2005); the Balzan Prize (2006); the Dawson Prize for Genetics from the University of Dublin (2013) and the Gruber Genetics Prize (2018). Meyerowitz is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, is a foreign associate of the Académie des Sciences of France, and a foreign member of the Royal Society.
Dale Sanders - University of York, UK
Dale Sanders holds honorary visiting professorships at the University of York, UK and the Agricultural Genomics Institute Shenzhen, China. From 2010 until 2022 he was Director of the John Innes Centre. He has recently been elected as a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
After graduate study at Cambridge University, Dale held post-doctoral fellowships at Yale University School of Medicine where he pioneered the use of quantitative reaction kinetic models to determine the role of plasma membrane proton pumps in the control of cytosolic pH. This approach was extended both at Yale and as a faculty member at the University of York to elucidate the behaviour of proton-coupled nutrient transporters in response to variable substrate concentrations and membrane voltage. More recent research has focussed on calcium signalling and on intracellular cation homeostasis. Dale was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001.
Social Media Editor
Joanna Chustecki - University of Birmingham, UK
Joanna is currently a PhD student at the University of Birmingham, studying mitochondrial dynamics in plant cells. Her work uses a variety of laboratory based and computational approaches. Alongside her research she has a keen interest in public engagement with science, particularly communicating the range of plant research globally, and encouraging changing perceptions.