I work with them

I have awesome colleagues in my team. Go check them out! Want to be part of our team? Get in touch!

Current lab members [FZJ & UCLouvain]


Clara Lhoest (she/her)

Meet Clara, a PhD student at UCLouvain University with an unwavering passion for plants. But Clara’s journey isn’t your typical botanical affair : she’s embarking on a captivating investigation. Her mission? To unravel the mystery of enhancing water resilience in wheat through the enigmatic world of root traits. Armed with a unique blend of greenhouse trials, real-world field missions, and modeling experiments, Clara is on the trail of nature’s secrets, determined to crack the case.

Website


Sathyanarayan Rao (he/him)

Dr. Sathyanarayan Rao is a post-doctoral scientist with the Phenorob project, working on the forefront of digital agriculture. His work concentrates on creating a digital twin to replicate real-world agricultural environments, offering a fresh perspective on how we understand and interact with these systems. Intrigued by the complexity of agricultural and environmental systems, he seeks to understand how integrating models across multiple scales can reveal the intricate interactions within these systems. This research, driven by the pursuit of capturing these interactions and feedbacks, aims to enhance our comprehension of these complex systems at various scales, from the cellular level to regional phenomena.

Website


Sacha Pollet (she/her)

Sasha Pollet is a PhD student in Soil Science at the faculty of Land and Food system, University of British Columbia, under the supervision of Dr. Jean-Thomas Cornelis, and co-supervised by myself. Sasha will be studying how the pedological context and P fertilization gradient impact the production and quality of root exudates, as well as their roles in acquiring nutrients and storing carbon in the soil.

Website


Marco D'Agostino (he/him)

Marco is working on better understing how tomato anatomies is linked to water uptake dynamics at the plant level. He is interested in exploring how natural variation in closely related wild species can help us develop more resilient tomato plants.



Juan Baca (he/him)

Juan is a plant physiologist with a special interest in improving the mechanistic understanding of grass responses to global change parameters. He works on the DETECT project in modelling the impacts of agricultural management on soil–plant–atmosphere interactions

Website


Nicolas Biot (he/him)

Nicolas is a teaching assistant at the Bioengineering Faculty of the UCLouvain. His work focus on the understand of local food system dynamics, with a strong modelling approach



Felix Bauer (he/him)

Felix work on the PhenoRob project, trying to understand how phosphorus affect the plant growth and functionning, using (of course) functional plant models. He is also a avid plant phenotyper and enthousiatic pipeline developper.

felix__bauer


Mona Giraud (she/her)

Mona is a PhD student working on a BMBF-funded project entitled “Rhizo4Bio (Phase 1): CROP - Combination of Complementary Root Phenotypes for More Resistant Agroecosystems”. She is very enthousiastic about the modelling of wheat whole plant growth, water and carbon fluxes within the plant, and root-soil interactions.



Xiaoran Zhou (he/him)

Xiaoran is a PhD student at the Forschungszentrum Jülich. His previous experiences are based on studying his major, Viticulture and Enology, with modeling and web applications. His interest is to develop a mechanistic plant model (CPlantBox)that traces carbon and water movement in maize by explicit coupling of xylem and phloem fluxes.

zxrzxr



Alumni


Renaud Bulpa (he/him)

Renaud is intersted in cereal root development, with a current focus on spelt and wheat at the seedling stage. I also loves (I hope.. ) rhizotrons experiments. Renaud is now a PhD student in the lab of the Saoirse Tracy at the University Colleage in Dublin.



Hermann Prodjinoto (he/him)

Hermann is a plant physiologist with a special interest in toxicity resilience in Africa Rice. He is currently making a research stay in the lab to learn how to model such processes. Hermann is now a postdoc at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Website


Remy Schoppach (he/him)

Remy’s work aims at understanding how environmental stresses affect plant physiology and identifying innovative traits that allow adapted crops/genotypes to improve their tolerance strategies and to maintain an economically viable yield under stress conditions. He defines himself as a plant physiologist who examines the bases of exceptional stress tolerance through the investigation of underlying physiological mechanisms.

RSchppch Website


Thomas Feron (he/him)

Thomas worked within the framework of the PhenoRob project. His research is at the intersection of plant modelling, phenotyping an machine learning. Thomas is now a Computer Vision Engineer at Colruyt Group Smart Technics.

_ThomasFeron_


Adrien Heymans (he/him)

Adrien was a PhD student at the UCLouvain. He is deeply interest “in silico” plants and ways to grow a more suistanable agriculture. Adrien now works as a post-doc researcher at Umeå Plant Science Centre and work on leaf epidermis. We were very sad (but also happy) to see him leave the nest.

Heymans_Adrien


Clément Saint-Cast (he/him)

Clément is a post-doc working on quantifying the influence of root anatomical traits on water dynamics in tomato roots. He loves models, databases and ontologies! Clément is now permanent research at the INRAE in Bordeaux, working on FSPM and grape vines.

clement_cast Website