Birthe Haest is a PhD student in the laboratory of Myeloid Cell Biology in Tissue Homeostasis and Regeneration of Prof Martin Guilliams at Flanders Institute for Biotechnology (VIB)-UGent Center for Inflammation Research. In 2019, she obtained her Master degree in Biochemistry and Biotechnology at Ghent University. For her master’s thesis she went to Maynooth, Ireland, to study macrophage activation. In 2022, the proteogenomic atlas of human and murine liver was published in Cell. This was a huge collaborative effort between the Guilliams and Scott labs in which Birthe took part. Currently, she is investigating the cell-cell interactions that drive liver regeneration.

My research career has focused on the central biological question: How do growth processes determine final plant organ size? Initially, I approached this using molecular biology studying Arabidopsis leaf development. As my interest shifted towards applied research, I redirected my focus to maize. What started as translational research to bring knowledge from Arabidopsis to crops and from the lab to the field, gradually developed into a research line with the goal to decipher the instructor networks that govern leaf size, organ growth and ultimately yield in maize. Because plant organ size control is an important yield component that is also severely impacted by climate change, our ultimate goal is to deepen our understanding of the growth-regulatory networks to enhance our success rate to achieve climate-resilient crops.