Marco is a Heisenberg Professor at the RWTH Aachen University and holds the chair of the Institute for Molecular Plant Physiology . He studied microbiology at the University of Los Andes in Colombia. He obtained a stipend during his Master to go to the University of Giessen, where he studied the interaction between cereals and powdery mildews fungi, which pose a serious threat to crop production. During his PhD he focused on the function of NADPH oxidases and the role of reactive oxygen species during the immune response. He then moved to the Sainsbury Laboratory in the U.K. where he switched to the model plant Arabidopsis to analyze ubiquitin signalling in Ken Shirasu’s Lab. After becoming an Alexander von Humboldt/JSPS fellow, Marco moved again overseas to the RIKEN Institute in Yokohama, Japan. He started his own group at the University of Würzburg where he became an assistant professor, and was later selected for the independent junior group leader position at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry in Halle (Saale). While being an interim Professor at the University of Freiburg he was accepted to the Heisenberg programme of the DFG. 

After her PhD at the University of Turin where she investigated the interaction between plants and herbivors, Carla moved overseas to the University of North Carolina for a Postdoc to elucidate HOmotypic fusion and vacuolar Protein Sorting (HOPS) tethering complex in Arabidopsis. In her current project, she is studying intersection points between ubiquitin signalling and different proteolytic systems.

Alex studies Biology at the University of Freiburg, and in his project his is taking a synthetic biology approach to develop a strategy to increase the steady-state of proteins by increasing their stability.

Alaa joins us us all the way from Palestina by way of the University of Fukuoka were did his M. Sc. and some postgraduate work. Now he's joined the team to unravel the regulation of the exocyst complex.