Invited Speakers
Valentin Couvreur, Universite Catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Valentin Couvreur is a FNRS Research Associate working on multiscale plant hydraulics at the UCLouvain Earth and Life Institute. After graduating as Bioengineer in soil and water resources, he had the chance to expand his modelling skills in soil-plant hydraulics under the guidance of Mathieu Javaux (UCLouvain, BE). During his PhD, Valentin found out that a simple model of root water uptake emerges mathematically from the complex root system hydraulic architecture approach. After a postdoc on the modelling of water balance in orchards with Jan Hopmans (UCDavis, USA), he dove into the world of “hydraulic anatomies” exploring hydrological principles from the cell- to the root-scale with Xavier Draye (UCLouvain, BE). In the framework of his ERC project “The Plant Water Pump” (2022), Valentin investigates the fascinating possibility of a mechanism of multicellular water pumping based on osmotic gradients across living cells in plants.
Kim Johnson, La Trobe University, Australia
Kim Johnson earned her PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia in the lab of Prof. Tony Bacic in 2005. She has worked in leading institutes in the UK, including as a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Edinburgh with Prof. Gwyneth Ingram and at the John Innes Centre with Prof. Michael Lenhard. She returned to Australia to start her research group at the University of Melbourne within the Centre of Excellence Plant Cell Walls in 2012 and moved to La Trobe University in 2018 as a lecturer and researcher in the School of Agriculture, Biomedicine and Environment. Prof Johnsons research within the La Trobe Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and Food and Centre of Excellence Plants for Space, aims to optimize crops for different environments. Her work looks at the cell wall, the 'skeleton' of the plant that influences how plants are used for food, fuel, medicines and textiles. Dr Johnson studies the pathways that change the cell wall in response to physical signals that arise during growth and/or in response to environmental stress.
Henrik Jonsson, Sainsbury Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Henrik is currently the Director of the Sainsbury Laboratory at the University of Cambridge and Professor of Computational Morphodynamics. He completed his undergraduate and graduate studies in Theoretical Physics before moving to computational modelling in Biology as a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech. He led a group at Lund University before moving to Cambridge in 2011. Henrik is a member of several journal editorial and advisory boards, as well as the Royal Physiographic Society in Lund. His group is combining high-resolution microscopy, molecular biology and computational modelling to gain a quantitative understanding of plant growth and development. The main focus is on stem cell niches in the shoot and on understanding the feedback mechanisms between gene regulation, hormonal signalling, and the mechanics of growth.
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