SEB Annual Conference Florence 2026

Dr Gabriel Krouk

Research Director , CNRS- France

Gabriel Krouk is a Research Director at CNRS (FR) in Montpellier, HiCiR in 2020-21-22. Gabriel studies are at the crossroads of biology (mainly molecular physiology) and modelling. His research was first focused on the crosstalk between nutrient sensing and hormonal signalling in plants. For his work on the nitrate transceptor (NRT1.1 aka CHL1 or NPF6.3), he received a prize from the French Academy of Science. His current work continues with the recent findings concerning the combinatorial effect of Nitrogen and Phosphorus signalling on plant development and molecular responses. His research also recently branched into very fundamental questions concerning in silico simulation of biological phenomena and machine learning. He is the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of a start-up company, BionomeeX.

Dr. Robyn Emmerson

University of Oxford

Robyn is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham in the Catoni group. Her research focuses on the transgenerational impacts of DNA hypomethylation in plants, using the model Arabidopsis thaliana. Her research interests span from epigenetic plasticity and DNA methylation to plant-environment interactions.

Dr. Yazen Al-Salman

Wageningen University & Research

"Dr. Yazen Al-Salman is a postdoc at the Centre for Crop Systems Analysis, Wageningen University, The Netherlands. His research focus is on plant water use and its interaction with environmental variables and their modelling, especially in crops".

Marco Giovannetti

University of Torino, Italy

Marco Giovannetti is an Associate Professor at the University of Turin, Italy. His research focuses on plant–microbe interactions, with particular emphasis on arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis, root genetics, and the plant microbiota. He investigates how these belowground relationships shape plant development, nutrient acquisition, combining genetic and microbiome perspectives to advance sustainable crop management. He is also enthusiastic about citizen science and lettuce.

Prof. Jurriaan Ton

University of Sheffield

I am a plant pathologist at the University of Sheffield (UoS). My lab explores how plants adapt to recurrent stress from pests and diseases. Apart from our long-standing interests in the molecular perception and signalling of chemicals that prime plant immunity (‘plant vaccines’), our current research mostly focuses on the epigenetic pathways by which plants memorise environmental stress and acquire long-term resistance. My lab also studies the functional relationship between root exudation chemistry and root-associated microbial communities, to gain a better understanding of how such rhizosphere interactions boost plant resilience against environmental stresses. Outside the lab, I co-direct the P3 Centre for Plant and Soil Biology of the Sheffield Institute for Sustainable Food. In this role, I work closely with agricultural stakeholders to facilitate the translation of fundamental research on model systems into sustainable solutions for crop protection.

George Littlejohn

George Littlejohn is an Associate Professor at the University of Plymouth and is the current Chair of the Plant Section. He is a previous President’s Medallist (EPA) and Chaired the SEB+ Section from 2015-2018.

Research in George’s group centres around plant-pathogen interactions and the use of complementary imaging modalities in plant stress biology. We focus on (1) understanding the cellular and molecular basis of rice blast disease and (2) non-invasive image-based diagnosis of plant disease and stress biology.

Ongoing projects in the lab involve (1) The role of the circadian clock in rice blast disease, which has shown the importance of both the plant and fungal circadian clocks in determining disease outcome; (2) pre-symptomatic diagnosis of plant disease (3) the role of the chloroplast in plant immunity.

Dr. Robyn Emmerson

University of Oxford

Robyn is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham in the Catoni group. Her research focuses on the transgenerational impacts of DNA hypomethylation in plants, using the model Arabidopsis thaliana. Her research interests span from epigenetic plasticity and DNA methylation to plant-environment interactions.

Dr. Amanda Cavanagh

University of Essex

Dr. Amanda Cavanagh’s research interest in plant environmental physiology covers molecular biology, biochemistry, and leaf physiology. Amanda completed her PhD at the University of New Brunswick in Canada, where she worked on Rubisco - the enzyme that feeds the world. During her postdoc at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the USA, she tested synthetic biology pathways that improve photosynthetic performance in crops under field and environmental stress conditions. She is currently a lecturer at the University of Essex, where her lab explores leaf and plant-level responses to abiotic stress under field and laboratory conditions, and is developing strategies to optimize crop performance in response to the changing climate.

: @@cavycavs @PlantEssex

Dr Vanessa Loiacono

Charles University

Vanessa completed her B.Sc. in Biological Sciences at the University of Bari (Italy), followed by an M.Sc. in Horticultural Sciences at BOKU Vienna in association with Humboldt University of Berlin. She pursued her Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology (Potsdam, Germany), investigating the roles of PPR proteins in chloroplast RNA editing and the co-evolution of nuclear and organellar genomes. After a postdoc at Cornell University, she returned to the Max Planck Institute to develop her independent research. Since September 2026, she has been the Group Leader of the Laboratory of Plant Organellar Gene Expression at Charles University in Prague.

Beyond her scientific work, Vanessa is actively engaged in social and artistic projects and has long advocated for LGBTQ+, FLINTA, and equal-opportunity initiatives.

Isabel Monte

University of Tuebingen

Isabel is a plant molecular biologist fascinated by the molecular evolution of signalling pathways in plants. Since 2022, she has led the Evolution of Plant Signalling Lab at the Center for Plant Molecular Biology (ZMBP; University of Tübingen), where she became Junior Professor in 2023. Their two main research lines are the evolution of receptor kinases in development and immunity, and the evolution of molecular plant-microbe interactions (EvoMPMI) using Marchantia polymorpha as our main model organism. In 2024, she obtained an ERC StG (FRIENEMIES) to investigate the evolution of pathogenic and mutualistic interactions between the fungus Trichoderma and land plants. She is also part of the DFG Clusters of Excellence GreenRobust and TERRA.

Kasper van Gelderen

COS University of Heidelberg

Kasper van Gelderen is a group leader at the Centre for Organismal Studies at Heidelberg University, working on plant light perception and signalling. He did his PhD in the lab of Remko Offringa at Leiden University on polar auxin transport, and was a postdoc at the lab of Ronald Pierik (then) in Utrecht, working on shade avoidance.

The research in his group focuses on the cell-biological aspects of plant light signalling; How photoreceptor complexes are organised in the nucleus and how the plant shoot can send signals to the root via mobile transcription factors. The main projects in his lab are 1) how phytochrome photobodies formed through the process of phase separation and how they function in light signalling. 2) Shoot-to-root communication of light signals in plants through the mobile transcription factor HY5.

Prof Marcel Quint

Institute of Agricultural and Nutritional Sciences at Martin Luther University Halle–Wittenberg

Marcel Quint studied horticulture at the University of Hannover from 1993 to 1998, where he developed a strong interest in plant genetics and physiology. From 1999 to 2003, he pursued his doctorate at the University of Hohenheim, Germany, working under Professor A.E. Melchinger on virus resistance in maize. He then moved to the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities for a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Plant Biology, collaborating with Professor W.M. Gray on the molecular mechanisms of auxin signalling in Arabidopsis.

In 2007, Marcel returned to Germany to establish an independent junior research group at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry in Halle (Saale). He led this group until 2012, when he became senior group leader in the Department of Molecular Signal Processing, focusing on the mechanisms of thermomorphogenesis signalling, an auxin-dependent developmental process. Concurrently, they have consistently explored the molecular evolution and evo-devo aspects of plant development. Since 2015, he has been a Professor for Crop Physiology at the Institute of Agricultural and Nutritional Sciences at Martin Luther University Halle–Wittenberg, where his group continues to investigate various aspects of plant thermomorphogenesis and related processes.