Spotlights

The “In the spotlight” series highlights articles published by Physiologia Plantarum with the aim of putting them in a broader context and making them accessible to all readers.

Our crew for 2023 is composed of 3 researchers and will be spiced by the researchers/students from our Assistant features editor program.

I am Divya Mishra, a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Prof. Marisa Otegui Lab, Department of Botany at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the US. I am investigating the role of autophagy protein in Maize during abiotic stress. I previously worked on understanding the potential of the CRISPR-Cas system and guide-induced gene silencing in various plant species in Dr David Cook’s Lab as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Kansas State University. I completed my PhD at the National Institute of Plant Genome Research, India, under the supervision of Prof. Niranjan Chakraborty. I studied the role of high-temperature responsive proteins in thermotolerance in wheat.
I am happy to join as AFE in the PPL team to learn, explore, and spread new findings to people with or without a scientific background.

My name is Sam van Es, I am from the Netherlands where I have done my PhD at Wageningen University, studying TCP transcription factors during plant development. I am currently working as a postdoc in the lab of Markus Schmid at the Umeå Plant Science Centre in Sweden on gene regulatory networks underlying flower development. I focus on Arabidopsis as a model system, while taking sneak peeks into other species, such as Gerbera and Barley.
I have been writing Spotlights and mash-ups from Special Issues’ articles for Physiologia Plantarum since 2020. I greatly enjoy the process, picking up an article from a variety of topics that strikes me as interesting, after which I try to highlight it and put it into a bigger perspective. In the long run, I hope, by writing Spotlights, to contribute a little to spreading the amazing research to a broader audience.

I’m Robert Calderon, a postdoc at the Umeå Plant Science Centre in Sweden. My research background is in photosynthesis, light signalling and plant development. I’m originally from Indiana, but I moved to California to do my PhD work on photosystem II assembly. I did a short postdoc in California exploring the link between phytochrome signalling and epigenetic changes before moving to Sweden where I am currently working on identifying factors that regulate early seedling development. One aspect of writing Spotlight articles that I’ve particularly enjoyed is having the opportunity to highlight how a particular research article might advance our broader goals as plant scientists. I hope that these Spotlights are accessible and understandable to anyone who reads them!