The Graduate School Experimental Plant Sciences (EPS)
The EPS office continues to work mostly from home because of the Covid-19 measures. You can contact us by e-mail at our normal working hours. We’ll try to answer your e-mails as soon as possible, but there may be some delay. We will try to keep the website updated with events that are being cancelled, but since not all information reaches us, it is best to always check with the organizer when in doubt.
Saskia van Wees was appointed as professor of Hormonal regulation of plant defense at Utrecht University on 1 March of this year. Her research focuses on plants’ defense signaling in their interaction with various types of microbes and insects. You can find more information on the UU website.
EMBO, the international European Molecular Biology Organization in Heidelberg, Germany, has elected Prof. Dolf Weijers (Wageningen UR) as one of its new members. The life-long membership is bestowed upon scientists in recognition of their remarkable achievements in the life sciences. More information: https://www.embo.org/news/press-releases/2020/embo-announces-newest-elected-members.html and https://www.wur.nl/en/news-wur/Show/EMBO-welcomes-newly-elected-member-Dolf-Weijers.htm
As PhD students, and also like many other researchers, we always have this time pressure hanging ominously above our heads. It forces us to be efficient, make quick and smart decisions and prioritize. Obviously, these are good habits in the world of science, but they force us into making constant trade-offs. This time pressure tends to take away opportunities for doing things that might not seem very useful or vital to our research at first glance. We tend to solely focus on our own research and this is exactly where the Covid-19 crisis turned the tables. Out of the blue, [...]
Quint Rusman, former PhD candidate at Wageningen University, has received the annual Hugo de Vries Award for the best PhD thesis in botany-related sciences in the Netherlands. Quint performed his PhD research at the Laboratory of Entomology under supervision of Prof. Marcel Dicke, Dr. Erik H. Poelman and Dr. Dani Lucas-Barbosa and defended his PhD thesis entitled ‘Caught between friends and foes; plant mediated interactions between herbivores and flower visitors’, on 12 April 2019. As MSc student Quint enrolled in the EPS Graduate Program, a program that offers excellent MSc students the opportunity to write a PhD proposal and apply [...]
The European Plant Phenotyping Network 2020 (EPPN2020) provides researchers belonging to academic and industry groups access to its 31 phenotyping facilities located all over Europe. The facilities can be used for experiments with either scientific or technological objectives. EPPN2020 has just launched its sixth call for application for transnational access, open to European groups but also open (to a limited extent) to groups originating from emerging countries or international research centers. Access is granted on the basis of a simple application procedure. Selected users obtain full support to perform the proposed experiments including: - Free access for eligible user groups [...]
Show your love of plants! Post something to your social media channels to show others how fascinating and important plants are and use #FoPD and #PlantsDay. Listen here to Radio Gelderland where Dolf Weijers, professor of the Laboratory of Biochemistry at Wageningen University & Research, talks with Rob Kleijs about Fascination of Plants Day (hour 2, approximately from minute 14:20 onwards; in Dutch).
The KNAW Early Career Award is intended to support and encourage talented PhD graduates. The Award is aimed at researchers at the start of their career who are capable of developing innovative and original research ideas. A maximum of twelve Awards are presented each year, divided among the four Academy domains (Humanities; Behavioural Sciences, Social Sciences; Natural Sciences and Engineering; Medical, Biomedical and Health Sciences). The KNAW Early Career Award consists of a sum of 15,000 euros, made available from the Academy Fund, and an artwork. The money may be spent at the discretion of the winners on their own [...]
On March 1st, Geert Smant was appointed as professor and chair at the Laboratory of Nematology at Wageningen University & Research. He is the successor of Prof. Jaap Bakker, who has held this position since 1998. Geert Smant graduated on symbiont-independent degradation of cellulose by animals (i.e. nematodes) in 1998, which at that time was considered a breakthrough discovery in biology. It is thought that horizontal gene transfer of carbohydrate-degrading enzymes from bacteria has played an important role in the evolution of plant parasitism in nematodes. In his current research, Geert Smant studies the molecular and genetic interactions between sedentary [...]
