Naomi obtained her master’s degree in Biochemistry and Biotechnology from Ghent University in 2020. For her master’s thesis she performed an Erasmus exchange to the Sainsbury lab of Cambridge University (SLCU), where she worked on the role MtLSH1 and MtNOOT1/2 during early nodule organogenesis in Medicago truncatula within the group of Prof. Dr. Giles Oldroyd. Currently, Naomi is performing her PhD research (FWO-SB fellowship) at the Rhizosphere group of Prof. Dr. Sofie Goormachtig, this time shifting her focus to another symbiont: arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF). During her PhD, Naomi uses diverse single cell and -nuclei transcriptomics and proteomics approaches to obtain a better understanding of the immunity-related crosstalk occurring during the tomato-AMF symbiotic interaction.

Afroditi obtained her Master’s degree in Advanced Experimental and Computational Biosciences at the University of Thessaly, Greece, in 2022, where she worked on plant-fungal transkingdom RNAi. During her studies she participated at the iGEM competition, a worldwide synthetic biology competition, as a team member in 2019, a team advisor at 2021 and a team instructor at 2022. In 2022, she moved to Belgium and joined the research group of Prof. Dr. Sofie Goormachtig and started a PhD (FWO fellowship) under the supervision of Dr. Sylwia Struk, at the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology. Her research focuses on the interaction of nitrogen-fixing rhizobia and Soybean, and the regulation of the nodulation process. More specifically, her project concentrates on the final steps of the Autoregulation of Nodulation (AON) pathway and the Too Much Love (TML) genes of Soybean, and how they control nodulation.