Programme

Plenary 1: DIANE BASSHAM
Iowa State University (ISU), Iowa, USA.

Diane Bassham received her B.Sc. (Honours) in Biochemistry from the University of Birmingham, England and Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from the University of Warwick, England. After completing a post-doctoral appointment in the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory, Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, she joined the faculty at Iowa State University in 2001. In 2013, Prof. Bassham was chosen as the first Walter E. and Helen Parke Loomis Professor of Plant Physiology and in 2020 was named a Fellow of the American Society of Plant Biologists. Her research focuses on trafficking of macromolecules to the plant vacuole in response to environmental signals. A major project is analysis of the mechanism and regulation of autophagy, a vacuolar degradation pathway, in response to abiotic stress. Autophagy is required for the tolerance of multiple stress conditions, and therefore is a promising target for generation of stress-resistant plant varieties.

Plenary 2: ANA I. CAÑO-DELGADO
Centre de Recerca en Agrigenòmica (CRAG), Barcelona (Spain)

Dr. Ana I. Caño-Delgado is a CSIC Investigator and coordinator of the Plant Signaling & Development Program at the Centre for Research in Agricultural Genomics (CRAG) in Barcelona. She did a PhD in Biology at John Innes Centre (UK) and was a HFSPO Postdoctoral Fellow at Salk Institute (US). She is internationally recognized for publishing numerous high-impact scientific journals, has received awards in science and entrepreneurship and is an elected EMBO Member since 2016. At CRAG, she leads the Brassinosteroid signaling group supported by an ERC CoG grant to engineering crops able to grow on severe drought. These achievements are the results of two decades of studies in plant steroids hormones, Brassinosteroids, in which she pioneers the study of signaling mechanisms with cell-specificity. Her team discovered that vascular steroid receptors confer resistance to drought without penalizing growth. In the context of a climate emergency, Caño-Delgado is currently translating her scientific results to cereal Sorghum to ensure food security. In addition, Caño-Delgado is an engaged science communicator chasing two specific goals: encouraging women in science leadership and acceptance of gene edition tools in agriculture.


List of publications:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=caño-delgado

Plenary 3: WOLF B. FROMMER
Alexander von Humboldt Professor, Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf, Germany  and Institute for transformative Biomolecules (ITbM), Nagoya University, Japan.

Wolf obtained his PhD at the University of Cologne, Germany with Peter Starlinger. After a short stint at the Academy of Sciences in Shanghai, he became postdoc in Lothar Willmitzer’s lab. He obtained a Young Investigator group leader position at the IGF in Berlin, became Full professor at Tübingen University where he cofounded the ZMBP. He then joined the Carnegie Institution for Science and Stanford University and became Director of the Department of Plant Biology in Stanford. Since 2016/2017 he is Professor at the Excellence Clusters CEPLAS Düsseldorf and ITbM, Nagoya. Wolf’s lab identified many key genes for plasma membrane transporters including SUT H+/sucrose symporters, SWEET sugar uniporters and ammonium and amino acid transporters and characterized their roles in physiology. Notably, his lab exploits the role of SWEETs in pathogen susceptibility to develop elite varieties resistant to rice blight. His lab developed fluorescent sensors for a wide range of metabolites. He now has begun to also study the enigmatic plasmodesmata and their function in carbon allocation. He is Fellow of the German Academy of Sciences and AAAS, and received the Gottfried-Wilhelm Leibniz award, Körber prize, Laurence-Bogorad award, Tsungming-Tu award and the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship.