Sandy Knapp is a research botanist at the Natural History Museum in London whose specialty is taxonomy and evolution of the nightshade family, Solanaceae. Her work spans biodiversity and genomics, integrating across fields for better understanding and a sustainable planet. Sandy has served on numerous editorial boards and has led several NGOs, including the Linnean Society of London, Fauna & Flora USA, the International Association for Plant Taxonomy and the Botanical Society of Britian and Ireland. She has received numerous awards for her work in outreach, biodiversity conservation, and botanical science. Sandy holds honorary professorships at University College London and Stockholm University. She has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academia Nacional de Ciencias of Argentina, Academia Europeana and is a Fellow of the Royal Society. She was awarded an OBE in the King’s New Year Honours in January 2023 and in 2024 the Engler Medal in Gold by the International Association for Plant Taxonomy for lifetime achievements in botany. She is passionate about promoting the role of taxonomy and the importance of science for conservation and sustainable development worldwide and is committed to increasing openness, diversity, and inclusion in science.
Sophien Kamoun grew up in Tunisia where he developed a passion and curiosity about nature. He studied genetics in Paris and Davis, California, before working in Wageningen, Ohio and Norwich, where he is currently a Senior Scientist at The Sainsbury Laboratory and Professor of Biology at The University of East Anglia. He is known for his seminal contributions to our understanding of plant diseases and plant immunity having pioneered genomics and molecular biology methods to reveal fundamental insights into the biology and evolution of eukaryotic plant pathogens. His inventive work in plant pathology has resulted in new approaches to mitigate some of the world’s most serious crop diseases. He is well-known as a champion of open science, including open data, transparent peer review, and preprints to promote rapid dissemination of science. Professor Kamoun has received many awards and recognitions, notably the Kuwait Prize and The Linnean Medal. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2018. Kamoun Lab Web Site http://www.kamounlab.net
Jim Giovannoni is Director of the United States Department of Agriculture – Agricultural Research Service Robert W. Holley Center for Agriculture and Health located on the Cornell University campus in Ithaca, New York where he also holds Adjunct Professor appointments both with Cornell and the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research. He has been with the USDA since 2000 and was previously a Professor of Horticultural Sciences at Texas A&M University. He received his Bachelor’s degree from UC Davis and his PhD from UC Berkley. Jim was elected to the U. S. National Academy of Sciences in 2016. From his graduate thesis to the present, Jim and his lab have focused on regulation of fleshy fruit ripening and related nutritional pathways. His group identified the first transcription factors regulating ripening and his lab is currently exploring the role of the epigenome during fruit development along with opportunities to identify and utilize novel genetic variation captured within the germplasm of tomato and its wild relatives for improved fruit traits.
Giovanni Giuliano is Research Director at ENEA (the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development) in Rome, Italy. He graduated in 1981 at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa and did postdoctoral studies at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1988, he is staff scientist (presently Research Director) at the Italian National Agency for New technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA), Rome, Italy. He co-authored >150 papers, mainly in the fields of Solanaceae/Rubiaceae genomics and of (apo)carotenoid biosynthesis (https://scholar.google.it/citations?hl=en&user=Yp9Iny4AAAAJ), and is included in several highly cited scholar databases (eg https://elsevier.digitalcommonsdata.com/datasets/btchxktzyw/7). He coordinated several EU projects, among which the recent G2P-SOL (focused on the genetic resources of the four major Solanaceous crops) and PRO-GRACE (focused on building GRACE, a large European research infrastructure on plant genetic resources). He has received several recognitions, including the 2016 award in Biological Sciences and their applications by the Italian Accademia dei Lincei, and has co-organized several past carotenoid Gordon conferences and Solanaceae meetings.
Alain Goossens is group leader at the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology and Senior Full Professor at Ghent University. He obtained his Master in Biology-Plant Biotechnology at Ghent University and his PhD in Marc Van Montagu’s and Geert Angenon’s lab at the Laboratory of Genetics, Ghent University (1998), studying plant seed storage protein synthesis. During his PhD, he has also been a visiting researcher at CIAT in Cali (Colombia) in the group of César Cardona. After obtaining his PhD degree, he performed postdoctoral studies for 2 years at the IBMCP-UPV in Valencia (Spain) in the lab of Ramón Serrano, supported by a TMR-Marie Curie EU postdoctoral fellowship, and working on yeast salt tolerance. He returned to VIB-Ghent University and started his own research group in 2003, focusing on jasmonate signaling, plant specialized metabolism and metabolic engineering. He aspires to unravel the mechanisms that steer plant metabolism in fitness programs to find novel tools for plant synthetic biology. He has been appointed as a Senior Full Professor at Ghent University in 2022. In 2024 he was appointed as an Extraordinary Professor at Stellenbosch University (South Africa). In 2020 he was elected as an EMBO fellow and since 2015 he has been continuously included in the Clarivate list of Highly Cited Researchers.
A CSIC research Professor at the IBMCP, a joint institute of the National Research Council CSIC and the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain. I have been working in tomato for more than twenty years and have participated in several large initiatives including the sequence of the reference genome and coordinated several large EU funded projects in collaboration with academia, growers and seed companies. My main interest is tomato fruit quality with a focus in the nutritional and organoleptic aspects. My lab uses genetical genomics and reverse genetics and genome editing to understand how fruits are made and how they respond to environmental conditions. A genetic engineering enthusiast I have engineered tomato for accumulating health and flavour related compounds in their fruits for modification of their nutritional value and as factories of added-value compounds. I have coauthored over 200 SCI papers, with around 19000 citations and an H-index of 70. Inventor of 7 patents, recently funded 2 biotech companies MadeInPlant and Naplatec.
Esther van der Knaap is a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Georgia in the USA and a fellow of the AAAS. She received her bachelors in Plant Pathology at Wageningen University, her PhD in Genetics at Michigan State University and her post doc in Plant Breeding at Cornell University. After 14 years at the Ohio State University, she moved to Georgia where she continues to work on the molecular genetics of tomato fruit quality. Her work has been recognized for completing challenging gene cloning projects and the discovery of extensive genome structural variation underlying traits, primarily in tomato. The specific focus of her research is on fruit shape, weight and aroma content. Her lab explores ancestral germplasm for improvement alleles and the molecular and biochemical mechanisms behind the traits. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and USDA and has been peer reviewed in over 100 peer publications.
Valérie Poncet is an evolutionary geneticist by training (at the University of Paris XI, Orsay France). She is currently senior researcher at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD) and based in Montpellier, France. Her research (https://scholar.google.fr/citations?user=gS4c-YIAAAAJ&hl=fr&oi=ao) focuses on in the role of evolutionary processes in shaping diversity and adaptations of native coffee trees (Coffea arabica, C. canephora and other Coffea species) in their native environment in Africa. Valérie has years of experience of interdisciplinary research working with partners in the Global South, particularly at the interface between population genetics, genomics, ecology and biogeography. She also examines the impact of human activities on cultivated coffee trees, aiming to optimize the conservation and use of both wild and cultivated coffee genomic resources. Her recent projects include significant research in Uganda, addressing climate change’s effects on coffee agroforestry systems.
Prof. Salomé Prat is an expert in plant molecular genetics, with broad know-how in the areas of light and hormonal signaling in plants. Relevant scientific achievement by her group are the identification of a protein interaction cascade involving the DELLA repressors, which mediates an opposite regulation of plant growth by light and gibberellins. These findings established that DELLAs restrict cell elongation by blocking DNA recognition by PIFs, which paved the way to identification of many other partner interactors of these GRAS repressors. Furthermore, she established that a day length pathway related to that controlling flowering transition in Arabidopsis modulates storage organ formation in potato. Her team identified two potato FT paralogs that respectively act as the mobile flowering and tuberization signals, and showed that the potato CONSTANS factor suppresses tuber formation in LDs, by activating an additional anti-florigen FT family member antagonizing the tuberization inducing paralog.
Jaime Prohens is a Full Professor of Genetics and Plant Breeding at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), where he has been a faculty member since 1997. His research focuses on genetics and breeding of Solanaceous vegetable crops. As leader of the Solanaceae Breeding Group at the Institute for Conservation and Improvement of Valencian Agrodiversity (COMAV), he has contributed to enhance resilience, quality, and adaptation to climate change of several Solanum crops. Prof. Prohens has published over 200 articles in indexed journals, including a study in Science on the genetic basis of prickles in Solanum and other plants. He has coordinated over 25 national and international research projects, and participated in several H2020 and Horizon Europe initiatives. In addition to his research, Prof. Prohens is a dedicated educator who has supervised 18 PhD dissertations and numerous MSc theses. He has held prominent leadership roles, including President of the European Association for Research on Plant Breeding (EUCARPIA) and the Spanish Society for Horticultural Science. His work has been recognized with the SECH Young Researcher Award (1999), an honorary doctorate from the University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine of Cluj-Napoca (2012), and the UPV’s Outstanding Research Impact Award (2023).
Magdalena Rossi is Full Professor at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. She obtained her PhD in Biological Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1996 studying the abscisic acid, stress and ripening related gene family in tomato. Part of her thesis was performed in Luis Herrera Estrella`s lab at CINVESTAV, México. Then, she spent two years at UCDavis, USA, working in molecular phytopathology where she identified the first insect resistance gene in plants. Thereafter, from 1999 to 2005, she performed a second postdoc at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, where as part of a team with over 30 labs in Sao Paulo state she developed an ambitious project that characterized sugarcane transcriptome (SUCEST). In 2001, as visiting researcher, she performed a resistance gene analogues mapping project in sugarcane at CIRAD, France. In 2005, as full-time professor and funded by European Solanaceae Integrated Project, she established her own research group at the University of Sao Paulo working on the identification and characterization of genetic determinant involved in yield and nutritional quality in tomato. Throughout her career her group has identified and characterized tocopherol biosynthetic pathway, chlorophyll degradation genes, and senescence related genes in tomato. More recently, Rossi`s lab has focused on the impact of light perception and signalling in crop yield and quality. In this context, her group is working on the characterization of light-defence trade-off mechanism aiming to develop biotechnological strategies for uncoupling both molecular signalling pathways for crop tailoring
Is a senior researcher at the Institute of Vegetable and Flower Research in the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing, and Director of the Genetic Breeding Research Department for Solanaceae Vegetables. His work is dedicated to innovative germplasm, genetics research and breeding technologies, and is mainly applied to pepper. He developed more than 57 pepper varieties, cultivated on over 2 million ha worldwide. He has published over 120 papers on international journals and is co-author of 17 national patents. He received the Chinese National Science and Technology Progress Award in 2006.
Roberto Bassi graduated in Biology at the University of Padua (1977), after which he worked as a microbiologist and botanist at the same University until 1983, when he became assistant professor in Plant Physiology and Biochemistry. He specialized in genetics in Copenhagen, biophysics in Paris and molecular biology in Geneva. He has taught General and Plant Biochemistry, Physiology and Synthetic Biology in Padua, Urbino, Marseille, Lausanne and Verona. His research focuses on the structure and function of photosynthetic systems of plants and algae and on the physiology of environmental stresses with the aim of optimizing the efficiency of light conversion into biomass and devising biotechnological solutions for environmental sustainability, with particular reference to the management of the carbon cycle. He has published more than 300 articles in international journals with an Hf of 106 and 31,000 citations. He is a member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, the Accademia Nazionale di Tecnologia, EMBO, the Accademia Europea and others. He has been awarded the Baccarini-Melandri Prize, the Herlitzka Prize for Physiology, the von Humboldt Prize, the Chinese Academy of Sciences Prize and the Miller Research Chair at Berkeley. He is P.I of the ERC advanced grant GrInSun (2022-2027). He was president of the scientific committee of the Anton Dorhn Station in Naples, of which he is currently the President.