Trang Tran successfully completed his doctoral program fully-funded by VLIR-UOS at Ghent University in 2021, focusing on investigating the modes of action of Streptomyces strains against fungal phytopathogens and mitigating mycotoxin contamination of maize grains through good agricultural practices (GAPs). Subsequently, he served as a postdoctoral researcher at INRAE in France, where his research aimed to unravel the antifungal and antimycotoxin mechanisms of stilbenoids against Fusarium Head Blight, utilizing multi-omics approaches. Trang Tran then held the position of an FWO postdoctoral researcher at UGent and KULeuven. In this role, he was dedicated to exploring fructan metabolizing microbes and developing sweet immunity-mediated synthetic microbial communities (SWEETiCOM). The combination of fructans as prebiotics and SWEETiCOM has the potential to promote plant growth and enhance plant tolerance to both biotic and abiotic stresses. Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow at VIB-UGent center for Plant Systems Biology. His role is to discover novel bioactive metabolites via exploiting the chemical warfare during tomato-fungi interactions. He aims to establish an innovative plant-based platform to awaken the vast majority of cryptic biosynthesis gene clusters in fungi, thereby discovering and producing previously unknown fungal bioactive metabolites with potent applications for agriculture and human health. Interests: • Microbe-plant interaction • Biostimulant - Priming - Biocontrol • Transcriptomics • Metabolomics • Phenomics

Mingjian Zhou obtained his bachelor degree in bioengineering at Jiangsu University of Science and Technology in China. He begins a continuous academic project that involves postgraduate and doctoral study on Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Nanjing agricultural University from September 2020. He focused on the redox-based regulation of hydrogen sulfide and persulfidation and mechanisms of osmotic and drought tolerance in plants. He joined oxidative stress signaling research group of Professor Frank since November 2022 as a joined Ph.D. student and based the topic of “Thiol-Based Protection Mechanisms In Plant Stress Responses: From S-Sulfenylation To Persulfidation”.

Michiel Vandecasteele obtained his PhD in Bioscience Engineering at Ghent University in 2019. During his PhD, he studied the occurrence, genotypic diversity, and the mode of action of pathogenic Alternaria species on Flemish potato fields, while also performing educational tasks as an assistant. In 2020, he returned to the Rhizosphere group as a doctor-assistant since he performed his Master's thesis in the same group eight years prior. Now, he investigates the action of drought-tolerance-inducing rhizobacteria on maize plants.

Thomas obtained his PhD from the University of Georgia with Wayne Parrott, developing several molecular tools for soybean biotechnology. In 2014 he moved to the lab of Greg Martin at the Boyce Thompson Institute for his postdoc. There he started developing CRISPR screens in plants. In 2016 he started the Plant Genome Editing group at the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology. In 2022 he was appointed Associate Professor at the University of Gent. His group is focused on developing easy-to-use genome editing systems for all kinds of plant species, specifically focused on making large-scale gene knockouts and base editing.