Biography

During my PhD period, I studied evolutionary and ecological signals in the wood anatomy of flowering plants. My postdoc internship in the Sperry lab (Univ. of Utah, USA) taught me how to perform water flow measurements in stems, which enabled me to functionally interpret my wood anatomical observations with respect to drought stress resistance. The outcome of this visit has yielded an award winning paper on maples (New Phytologist Tansley Medal for Excellence in Plant Science). Another line of research that has always fascinated me as an evolutionary biologist is to understand the frequent life form transitions in flowering plants. I discovered that most woody species that have evolved from herbaceous relatives are native to dry continental vegetation types, while this phenomenon was thought to mainly occur on oceanic islands. My unique global dataset on derived woodiness in flowering plants shows that woodiness has evolved at least 700 times independently, which raises the intriguing question which environmental factors triggered wood formation in all these lineages.

In addition to the question why plants became woody during evolutionary history, I am interested to know what are the genes that have turned on the wood pathway in all these hundreds of derived woody groups using gene expression and QTL experiments. I hope my research could contribute to complementary directions, such as inducing woody and thus more drought resistant and taller phenotypes in otherwise herbaceous crops that may help us to produce more food in a world where plant growth will become more demanding due to climate change.