Andreas Joined the Van Damme lab as part of his master II studies in biochemistry and biotechnology at the Ghent university. During his master II project he focussed on inactivation strategies of the endocytic adaptor complexes, the AP-2 complex and the TPLATE complex. After graduating, he joined the lab as a PhD student to work on a proteomics project with the AP-2 complex and the TPLATE complex, looking for novel players in clathrin-mediated endocytosis. He is currently funded by an FWO fundamental research fellowship since 2020.

Making Research Infrastructure Running Smoothly...

I am a multi-disciplinary scientist and generalist with 10+ years of experience in leading research programs, managing a team and mentoring young academics, guiding them to make the right choices. My professional interests are as broad as my skills. I have been doing technical development in light microscopy, optomechanics, optical manipulation, vision. I also speak the language of the Life Sciences. I worked on the biophysics of the cytoskeleton, cell division, and the mechanics of embryo development. In the past, I have been heading a multi-disciplinary team of engineers, physicists, and biologists that seeks solutions to technical challenges and basic research questions. We have been developing dedicated microscopy, micromechanical and microfluidics instruments, and image processing pipelines to address basic questions in developmental biology. After leaving fundamental research in academia in 2023, I have changed gear and focus on research service, operations, tool development and instrument engineering using all my expertise and experience.

Matilde Sanches graduated in 2017 as master of Biodiversity and Plant Biotechnology at University of Coimbra, Portugal. During her master thesis, under the guidance of Prof. Jorge Canhoto, she studied developmental epigenetics throughout somatic embryogenesis of tamarillo plant (Solanum betaceum, Cav.), performing experiments and developing skills (particularly immunofluorescence microscopy) at Pilar S. Testillano's lab in CIB-CSIC, Madrid, Spain. After a one-year experience as Project Developer - DIVA project (H2020) and SKAN Platform activities - at INOVISA (Lisbon, Portugal) and at the Centre for Investigation and Transference of Technology to Community Development (CITT - Maputo, Mozambique), she enrolled in the Plants for Life Doctoral Program in 2019, from ITQB NOVA (Lisbon, Portugal). During her PhD project, focussing on the study of quantitative genetics and mechanisms behind water stress tolerance in grass pea (Lathyrus sativus), she had the opportunity to foster a collaboration between Dr. Carlota Vaz Patto's lab (PlantX group, ITQB NOVA, Oeiras, Portugal) and Prof. Frank Van Breusegem'lab (Oxidative Stress Signalling group, PSB-VIB, Ghent, Belgium). Her main scientific interests are I&D in the agronomic sector, particularly stress resilience in plants, the genetics and epigenetics underlying it; and more important, the potential applications of that field of knowledge in crop improvement and breeding programs, with a particular fondness for orphan crops. More recent (but obviously related) passions are statistics, experimental design and data science, and it was in that framework that she recently joint Hilde Nelissen's Systems Biology of Yield group at PSV-VIB (Ghent, Belgium).

I obtained my master’s degree in Biochemistry and Biotechnology at the Ghent University in 2021. During my thesis I worked in the Pauwels lab on the combination of doubled haploid breeding and multiplex gene editing in maize. Later that year, I joined the group of Dirk Inzé and Hilde Nelissen where I worked on the BREEDIT ERC project, with a focus on genotype-phenotype correlation in multiplex edited maize lines. In 2022, I obtained an FWO PhD fellowship and joined the Pauwels lab again. The main focus of my PhD is to improve regeneration in maize with the goal to expand the number of transformable maize inbred lines, while also developing gene editing strategies.

Büşra is interested in biological sciences. After obtaining her Bachelor’s degree at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, she continued her studies in Belgium and finished a Master’s degree in molecular biology at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). During her studies, she discovered her passion about plant growth and decided further studying on plants. Her master thesis was based on a growth-promoting cytochrome P450 78A in maize and following that she started her PhD project at PSB. Currently, she is focusing on unraveling the enzymatic reaction and transcriptional regulation of this cytochrome P450 78A and working at the automated phenotyping platform Phenovision.