PREDOCTORAL FELLOW

Tingyu Zhu studied on cell biology at Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University in China. Her research focused on the role of GCCK/RP motif and conserved cysteine residues in distribution and function of Tetraspanin proteins in Arabidopsis. After her master‘s degree, she started her PhD in Advanced Live Cell Imaging group of Prof. Daniel Van Damme since September 2022. She is working on unraveling the role of temperature-dependent AtEH/Pan1 phosphorylation.

Ruben Vanholme is a staff scientist in the Bio-Energy and Bio-Aromatics group of Wout Boerjan.
Ruben graduated in 2004 as Master of Chemistry at Ghent University. He made a master dissertation in the Ghent Quantum Chemistry Group, under supervision of Patrick Bultinck. In 2005, he obtained an IWT grant to start his PhD in the Bio-Energy and Bio-Aromatics lab of Wout Boerjan. His research included the study of systems-wide consequences of lignin perturbations in Arabidopsis. For this, transcriptome and metabolome approaches were used. After obtaining his PhD degree in Biotechnology, he got two consecutive FWO post-doc grants to further investigate the lignin biosynthesis and engineering in Arabidopsis, poplar and maize. Meanwhile, he is staff scientist in the Bio-Energy and Bio-Aromatics lab as an expert in MS-based phenolic metabolite profiling and identification.
Ruben is actively involved in communicating science-based information about genetic engineering of crops. In addition, he is a climate warrior with a mission: to inform people on climate change and the dramatic loss in biodiversity it causes. He also informs what can be done to avoid further dramatic scenarios.
 

In 2014, Sandrien graduated as a Master of Science in Biochemical Engineering Technology at Ghent University. During her master’s thesis, she worked on the optimization and validation of the toxicological screening of drugs in blood samples on HPLC-PDA. Following her master’s thesis and after obtaining an FWO PhD scholarship, she started working in the Bio-Energy and Bio-Aromatics group of Prof. Wout Boerjan to study the aromatic metabolism of poplar and maize. During her PhD, she developed a combination of dry and wet lab tools for the structural characterization of specialized metabolites, and in 2020 she graduated as a Doctor of Sciences in Biochemistry and Biotechnology. She currently works as a metabolomics expert in the VIB Metabolomics Core Ghent, which is embedded in the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology