I am fascinated by the way, plants can detect, react and adapt to external cues. Research in my team focuses on understanding how a local stimulus, such as leaf wounding, can trigger plant-wide responses and how plants can distinguish between different stimuli, albeit using the same set of signaling molecules and mechanisms. Together with my team, I aim to decipher the underlying pathways, molecular components and principles of wounding-induced long-distance signaling in plants. Ideally, gained knowledge can help improving plant yield, adaptation and resilience.

I am interested in stimulus propagation during high light intensities. To understand how plants protect themselves from biotic or abiotic stresses, I will compare different triggers of systemic stimulus transmission. For this purpose I will use molecular biological, biochemical and electrophysiological methods.

I am interested in purifying plant glutamate receptor-like (GLR) proteins in order to capture their structure and study their function on a molecular level. I aim to obtain GLR full length structures and reveal their gating mechanisms so that we can better understand their physiological roles, i.e., during systemic signaling events.

I have been part of our institute from the beginning and support our team in all upcoming laboratory work, thanks to my experience with molecular biology methods and plant cultivation.

I am interested in wound-induced signaling in plants. Through electrophysiological methods and mass spectrometry, I aim to identify important components involved in the generation and transmission of the systemic signal, in order to understand how plants defend against herbivores.

I get excited about all aspects related to protein structure and function. To this aim, I apply cryoEM/ET as well as a set of biophysical and biochemical methods to characterize molecular components essential for plant stress signaling and cell-cell communication.

I am interested in detangling the biophysical mechanisms that allow plants to perceive, encode, and transmit information about their environment. For this, I use a variety of techniques ranging from reverse genetics to in-vitro and in-planta electrophysiology, or with optogenetics.

I aim to create and utilize (chemi)genetic indicators for examining alterations in cellular ion levels within plant cells. Specifically, my focus lies on the signaling processes triggered by wounding.