I’m a plant evolutionary biologist interested in phytochemistry, hybridization/speciation and plant interactions. I completed my PhD at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland with Christian Lexer before obtaining an early postdoc fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation to work with Loren Rieseberg at the University of British Columbia in Canada. These projects focused on understanding the role of genetic admixture and hybrid speciation on specialized metabolism and plant defenses in European poplar species and sunflower.
I’m currently working in the lab of Dan Kliebenstein at the University of California Davis (USA) on plant-pathogen interaction. Botrytis cinerea is a generalist plant pathogen with low host specificity that causes important pre- and post-harvest damages on a wide range of crop species. To understand the bases of both fungal virulence and plant susceptibility, I study the effects of domestication on seven Eudicot crop species and use Arabidopsis mutants to model and validate our theories.
I’m also Assistant Features Editor for The Plant Cell. Read my blog posts on The Plant Cell Extracts on Medium!