BSPP Plant Health Club: Research Fellowships

Co-chair: Katharina Schiessl, Sainsbury Laboratory.

Meetings are recorded and are available for BSPP Members here

Sebastian Eves-van den Akker is a geneticist with an interest in inter-kingdom communication.

He investigates the genes that control a dialogue between kingdoms of life: the two-way molecular communication between plants and their parasites. The outcome of this communication dictates plant organ development, animal sex determination, and ultimately human food security.

Sebastian received his B. Sc. in Biology (2007-2010) from the University of Leeds, and his Ph. D. in Plant-Pathology (2010-2014) from the University of Leeds and the James Hutton Institute. In late 2014, Sebastian was awarded an Anniversary Future Leaders Fellowship from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) to pursue independent research at the University of Dundee and the John Innes Centre (2015-2018). In 2018, he was awarded a BBSRC David Phillips Fellowship, a Research Fellowship at King’s College, and appointed Head of Group in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge. In 2021 he was awarded a Crop Science Centre Fellowship at the University of Cambridge, and an Official Fellowship at King’s College Cambridge.

Beatriz Orosa is Chancellor’s Fellow. University of Edinburgh

My scientific career started with a PhD at the University of Barcelona (Spain), where I studied the defence of Arabidopsis plants to fungal pathogens. During my PhD I also had the opportunity to work on human autoimmunity at the Institute of Health Research (Santiago de Compostela, Spain), focusing on deciphering the molecular signals that induce autoimmunity. After my PhD, I moved to Prof Ari Sadanandom’s group (Durham University) to study how plants employ protein posttranslational modifications (PTMs) for fast and accurate regulation of stress responses. Nonetheless, my increasing interest in PTMs led me to the University of Edinburgh to Prof Steven Spoel’s group, where I developed new proteomic tools to investigate for the first time how linkage-specific ubiquitin signalling orchestrates plant immunity. These preliminary findings and new methodologies underpin the next step in my career as Group Leader, developing my research ideas at the Institute of Molecular Plant Sciences.

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Read more about the BSPP Plant Health Club here.

Register for this event below by getting a ticket

You will receive a confirmation that your registration has been received, and the zoom link for the meeting will be emailed to you a day or two before the event.

Registration closes on 13th March