Originally from Kyiv, Ukraine, Nataliia has completed her Bachelor and Master studies at Queen Mary University and Imperial University London, respectively, with a focus on plant molecular and synthetic biology. For her PhD, she has moved to the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria to the group of Professor Luschnig to decipher the mechanisms controlling protein polarity in the root. Driven by the interest of understanding mechanisms guiding polarity, currently Nataliia is focused on studying the process of oriented cell divisions in Professor De Rybel's group.

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.

Maite Saura Sanchez

Maite earned her Bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology and her Master’s Degree in Plant Molecular and Cellular Biotechnology from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV). Following this, she relocated to Argentina to start her PhD at IFEVA (Buenos Aires), where she studied the role of BBX proteins in the shade avoidance responses in Arabidopsis thaliana. During this period, she also completed a Master’s degree in Bioinformatics and Biostatistics at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). In 2021, she joined Bert De Rybel's group to participate in a collaborative project with Tom Beeckman (PSB-VIB) and Tina Kyndt (UGent). Her current project aims to study the conserved mechanisms between dicots and monocots during de novo organogenesis processes in roots at the single-cell level.

Wei Xiao earned his PhD at ZMBP, University of Tuebingen, Germany, in 2022, supervised by Prof. Laura Ragni. Following that, he completed a one-year postdoctoral position at ZMBP, University of Tuebingen, Germany, supervised by Prof. Laura Ragni. In 2023, he is working as a Postdoctoral fellow in the group of vascular development, explicitly focusing on the vascular redevelopment in Selaginella moellendorffii.

Staff scientist

Thomas Eekhout graduated as a Master in Biochemistry and biotechnology at Ghent University in 2013 before starting his PhD on plant cell cycle regulation in the group of prof. Lieven De Veylder. After obtaining his PhD in 2018 he did a short postdoc in the same group, after which he joined the plant single cell platform of prof. Bert De Rybel in the summer of 2020. Since then, he has loaded and analyzed over two hundred samples from over 20 species for both internal and external groups on different single cell technology platforms.

In 2019, I obtained a Master in Biology at Ghent University. In 2024, I finished my PhD in plant Interactomics. Currently, I am the coordinator of the Plant Single Cell platform, located within the Vascular Development group of Bert De Rybel.

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.