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 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 moved back to Belgium in 2015 to initiate his own lab within VIB and was elected EMBO young investigator in 2019. Bert is currently group leader at VIB of the ‘Vascular Development’ lab and full professor at Ghent University. His group aims at integrating developmental, cell and evolutionary biology to understand how plant vascular tissues develop and is funded by FWO and ERC Consolidator grants.

Eline graduated from the Faculty of Sciences at Ghent University in 2021 with a Master in Biology, after which she continued her studies with a one-year Advanced Master in Plant Biotechnology. She performed her second Master thesis in the Vascular Development lab, where she subsequently joined to start a PhD in November 2022. Her project is embedded within the “PIPELINES” ERC Consolidator Grant (EU-funding) which was acquired by Bert De Rybel, and aims to discover novel transcriptional regulators in the process of vascular development through the use of single cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) data. By studying the scRNA-seq data of evolutionary diverged model species that contain a vascular system, she aims to find regulators in xylem and phloem which are evolutionary conserved.

Claudia von der Mark

With a strong background in root physiology and vascular development, Claudia joined the group of prof. Bert De Rybel in September 2022 to explore the transcriptional landscape and central regulators of xylem formation. During her undergraduate and graduate studies, which she conducted at the Heinrich Heine University in Dusseldorf (Germany), she worked on deciphering the plant’s iron deficiency response under the lead of Prof. Petra Bauer. In March 2018 she moved to Switzerland to conduct her doctoral research at the ETH Zurich. Together with her supervisor Prof. Antia Rodriguez-Villalon and colleagues she investigated the role of signaling phospholipids during vascular development. Claudia was a scholarship holder of the Walter Benjamin stipend (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) and is currently supported by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) in form of a junior postdoctoral fellowship.

I graduated in 2018 as a Master of Science in Biochemistry and Biotechnology at Ghent University, after which I performed my master thesis in the Rhizosphere group, investigating the function of parasitic KAI2 homologs in strigolactone signaling. In 2019, I then started my PhD to further unravel the KAI2 signaling pathway in Arabidopsis seeds and its role in seed germination, with a special interest in the function of the SMAX1 protein in all of this.